Present: Richard Bernardy, Anjana Bhatt, Carolyn Bivens, Priscilla Caplan, Jim Corry, Maggie Doherty, Denise Dotson, Mark Greenberg, Stephanie Haas, Maggie Hogue, John Ingram, Erich Kesse, John Nemmers, Lucy Patrick (chair), Walter Rowe, Carla Summers, Astrid Terman.
Florida Heritage, the Florida Online Encyclopedia and Collection Development
After the announcements, Maggie Doherty introduced Dr. Mark Greenberg, Director of the Resource Center for Florida History and Politics located at USF. Greenberg explained that the Center is broad-based and has a much wider range of interests than simply history and politics. It tries to cover K-12 curriculum, as well as higher education concerns and information for the general public. The Center has only $140,000 for its program budget and 3 state funded positions, including his. The program includes exhibits, fellowships to study Florida, and consulting with USF digital projects. The Center has a 35 person advisory council made up primarily of faculty from across the state.
One of their main projects is the Florida Online Encyclopedia (FOE). This was begun in cooperation with USF and the Florida Humanities Council and funded with a $50,000 NEH planning grant. They are currently working on an implementation grant for $400,000. They estimate the project will cost half a million a year for 5 years and $250,000 a year after that for maintenance and updating. Jim Miller, State Archaeologist, has been selected as the managing editor. FOE will be hosted at FCLA. Interested persons can request access to the working documents online by sending their email address to Greenberg at mgreenbe@lib.usf.edu.
Greenberg was very enthusiastic about the Encyclopedia having a strong relationship to PALMM and the Florida Heritage Collection. Articles contributed to the FOE will be written from previously published material and contain many links to primary resources online. The FOE will be arranged in topical sections with the following names: Geography and Environment; Archives and History of First Florida; Music and the Arts; People and Cultures; Religion; Literature; History; Architecture and Historic Preservation; Government and Politics; Tourism, Sports and Recreation. Greenberg offered the encyclopedia article authors and board as consultants for suggesting additions to Florida Heritage. Some of these people have already made suggestions for items to be added. Greenberg will forward the suggestion list to our list.
ACTION ITEM: DSPC members would like a want list that can be annotated and is fully searchable.
ACTION ITEM: DSPC was asked to consider changing the Florida Themes used in FHC to be more congruent with FOE sections. (Our themes are not based on LCSH)
At this point, John Ingram, chair of the newly appointed Collection Management Committee, was introduced and reported on the charge of the committee. They will be working with the DSPC, ECC, PSPC and TSPC committees to develop a more functional collection development process for the 11 members. It is anticipated that book budgets will be severely cut next year, so members will be trying to find ways to cut expenses. One of the main ways being suggested is cutting back to one paper subscription in the state for each of the online journals or databases available to all 11 institutions. It is unlikely that faculty will be amenable to this idea until they understand the gravity of the situation.
John reported that since the break up of the old united system is underway, and since the K-20 initiative is still alive, there are still a lot of unknowns for the future of collection management. The group discussed the idea that Florida Heritage collection development might be better done by a combination of scholars, library selectors, and perhaps some K-12 advisors.
The next topic of discussion was duplicates in the database. In general we agreed to try not to duplicate items unless there was a good reason such as a different visual quality. There have been instances of hand painted maps that were the same but decorated differently. This kind of difference might also be noted in different printings of the same book.
ACTION NEEDED:
If the duplicate item is an image, please notify FCLA that you know it is a duplicate and you meant to do it.
If the duplicate item is textual, please have your cataloger differentiate it in the bibliographic record noting the variant title or whatever it is that makes your copy unique.
The meeting moved on to consideration of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Currently UF is having theirs mounted by FCLA. They will be treated as a PALMM collection. FCLA is willing to host those of all 11 institutions. They see branding (having the name of your institution prominently displayed on the bib record and image display) as critical to the success of this kind of project since graduate schools want to be able to point to their ETDs. It would be possible to have an umbrella entry page and search for all ETD collections together and then a separate front page for each collection so it could be accessed individually. Currently only UF, USF, and FSU are developing ETD projects.
LSTA Grant Activities
Priscilla Caplan passed out copies of Ken Wells’ report on the LSTA cataloging project. 396 records out of 850 have been done. The handout also contained Ken’s travel schedule for the remainder of the project. It was reported that Hank Young has also been hired as an hourly contractor to assist in the cataloging of UF collections. Carla Summers reported that the preparatory work for cataloging was taking a lot more time than anticipated.
Caplan then brought to the group a query by Linda Smith (UNF) concerning using the Florida Heritage FIPS codes, timeline and topical headings in records being added to records created under the manuscript cataloging project. There seem to be good arguments for (more access points) and against (possible patron confusion) continuing this practice. It was thought this decision might need input from other committees.
ACTION ITEM: FCLA will investigate suppressing these non-standard headings in OPACs while keeping them searchable in Florida Heritage. If this cannot be done, we will ask the other committees for input.
Next on the agenda was the report on the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) project. The training has been done and the draft guidelines developed. The guidelines are available on the PALMM guidelines pages. Two libraries (USF and FSU) have submitted finding aids to FCLA. Astrid Terman and Chris Vicary will be working on this project. Currently FCLA is working on data entry problems, not display issues. We will be using the XPAT software for display, so our data should look something like the Bentley finding aids at the University of Michigan site (http://www.umich.edu/~bhl/EAD ). The working title for our pilot project is Finding Aids to Florida Archives and Manuscripts Collections. The search engine will search across all collections available. When the user pulls up the record for a particular collection, he or she will see the branding for the contributing institution. Erich Kesse mentioned his concern about our being able to work with UNC and Emory on regional digital archive projects.
Partnership Agreements and Guidelines
Anjana Bhatt distributed a list of 12 partnership projects currently underway or being negotiated and told us about 3 more that were not on the list. The subcommittee of Bhatt, Megan Waters, and Erich Kesse has done coordinating work, but have not yet been able to develop any guidelines or an agreement template. Priscilla Caplan reiterated Jim Corry’s feeling that since DCA represents both public and private institutions, it is desirable that we develop cooperative projects, particularly with private Florida universities. USF has a strong program of cooperation with the Tampa City Archives and Records and will be adding their materials to Florida Heritage. Everyone emphasized that signed agreements are critical to project success.
Historical Newspapers Meeting
Erich Kesse reported briefly on the state newspaper project currently underway by OCLC using the new OLIVE OCR software which is much more accurate than most OCR programs. OLIVE is marketed in the USA exclusively by OCLC. See below for more information about this item.
XPAT Text Class/Image Class; Photographic Collections Metadata
Priscilla Caplan explained that FCLA is moving the digital library files from 3 servers down to 2 (one for texts, one for images). This means that all textual works will be together, regardless of whether they are submitted as PDF files, page-image files, searchable SGML, or any combination of these. They will also be revising the displays for fulltext collections. The search and index screens will display the new Textual Collections banner, but once you go to a specific item, the banner of the specific collection (e.g., Florida Heritage) will be displayed. Some changes will happen immediately; the remainder should be completed by fall. Prospectively, when all changes are implemented, SGML full text will have to be submitted with an MXF wrapper. Priscilla introduced two new programmers Lijun Chen (image collections) and Donqing Xie (textual collections) who are working on these changes.
The visual collections will also be set up using the XPAT search engine using a search box and filters like the fulltext collections. Search results arrive as thumbnails with metadata matching your keywords. The XPAT software has the capability of creating a portfolio of images that can be displayed as a slide show. This has not yet been implemented. We discussed being able to associate multiple versions. If a MARC record exists for an item, the XPAT system can create metadata for the item using Dublin Core. Alternatively, it can create MARC records from the MXF wrapper of images.
There have been two conference calls of the subcommittee concerning metadata for photographs in PALMM. Priscilla distributed a draft of the core elements agreed upon, which are based on Dublin Core. The group decided to focus on describing the photograph itself, not the digital image. Therefore, the print is the original; the negative uses the "Relation.IsFormatOf.Format" and the digital image uses "Relation.HasFormat.Format".
FAIR WARNING: Before Fall 2003 we will be changing from the MXF wrapper to METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) which is the emerging national/international standard. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/standards/mets/. Priscilla assured us that it is very similar to MXF and that we won’t have to change until the very last minute.
Systems Development
Currently only FCLA and UF are using the PURL server. It is available to everyone and a backup is being installed. If you are interested in using it, Priscilla needs (1) a request from your Director stating that it is your intention to make a long term commitment to maintenance of your urls, and (2) a list of your naming conventions.
The issue of metadata harvesting by others has come up. Currently we have the capability in the XPAT software to export OAI compliant data to requests by harvesters, but it needs to be tested. Requests will require human intervention to load into XPAT from the MARC files.
OLIVE OCR Services Demo
Erich Kesse gave a brief demonstration of the British Library newspaper project. He will be sending out the URL for the test project site. OLIVE charges $45,000 for software to display XML marked up text, but you must pay for imaging and OCR of the material also. The cost is only about sixty cents a page from OCLC which is marketing the package in the U.S. UF is planning to do this for several Caribbean newspapers. The OLIVE OCR software is reputed to be virtually 100% accurate. Pages are scanned, OCRed , text is aligned with paragraphs in the image, and all are converted to XML format for display. There is keyword searching, or, one can call up a page and click on a particular article to be enlarged for reading on screen. The software is very impressive.
Wrap-up
It is time to update our work plan for PALMM (See our current three year plan at http://www.fcla.edu/FCLAinfo/digit/PALMMplan.html) Priscilla distributed a proposed update for the technical side. Erich Kesse, Lucy Patrick, and Maggie Doherty will work on the draft for the development and coordination program. Please review the current plan and send suggestions for changes and new items to the list for discussion.
Erich Kesse announced that a new PALMM collection, Florida Agricultural History and Life, is now available at http://palmm.fcla.edu/flag. The discussion returned to the multiplicity of collections with Florida topics, the "splintering" issue. Erich made a good case for aggregating not only the various Florida collections, but adding Caribbean ones that are in process, to a Florida and the Caribbean Basin umbrella. Erich offered to do a survey of digital collection development across the state to help us get a grasp on the variety of collections available, including those not in PALMM. Other kinds of collections might also be aggregated, for instance, literature collections or local focus collections, to create larger research collections. Priscilla said that searching across collections can be done as it is in the fulltext collections if we want to work toward this. Users could have a choice of searching across all collections, or selecting individual collections to be searched.
ACTION ITEM: Erich will report on his findings, after which we will begin to discuss on the list if and how we want to begin aggregating collections and what kind of search features we want to develop.
ACTION ITEM: Since the meeting, it has been suggested that we do a digitization capacity survey to find out who has what equipment, staffing, vendor experience, etc. Technology and staffing patterns are changing rapidly at a number of libraries as a result of the increased importance of digitization projects. We will be able to document the changes and learn from the experience of others.
It was suggested by Jim Corry that we consider having our chair serve for two years instead of one since by the time the chair learns the ropes, it is time for him or her to step down. It was the consensus of the group that this would be a good idea. Lucy Patrick, current Chair, and Maggie Doherty, current Vice-Chair/Chair Elect, agreed to continue in their respective positions until October 2003, when Maggie will become Chair. They agreed to try to develop a handbook to help future chairs cope.
The need to get out the word on what is available in PALMM was emphasized. Remember that there are publicity materials online available for printing and downloading at http://susdl.fcla.edu/promo.html. All of these items are free for PALMM libraries and their partners to use. The creation of and sharing of additional items is encouraged.