Minutes of the Meeting of the Digitization Services Planning Committee and Special Collections Task Force
Wednesday, December 12, 2001
Digital Library Center, 2nd floor, Library East, University of Florida

Present: Ellen Anderson, Richard Bernard, Anjana Bhatt, Priscilla Caplan, Sherry Crowther, Maggie Doherty, Stephanie Haas, Larry Heilos, Elaine Henjum, Maggie Hogue, Erich Kesse, Lucy Patrick, Walter Rowe, Connie Taylor, Carl Van Ness, Megan Waters.

Election of Vice Chair/Chair Elect: Maggie Doherty (USF) was unanimously elected to the position.

Review and update of our 3-year plan. We are currently in the second year of our three year plan and making good progress overall in meeting our goals.

Goal 1. Provide full suite of basic text and image handling capabilities. The full text server is operational and FCLA has developed software which will automatically mark up ASCII text for long runs of serials which are in the same format. This reduces the time involved in adding an issue of the Florida Historical Quarterly to the full text collection to about fifteen minutes each. The visual resources server is moving into production with our Florida map collection using DLXS Image Class. Several libraries reported they are interested digitizing photo collections, and it was agreed that a meeting of photo curators and other interested parties would be convened this Spring to discuss metadata standards for the various kinds of photo collections (aerial photos, postcards, general photos of buildings and persons, etc.), music, and realia. Two other software packages are still being investigated: Luna (which requires a Windows client and is being used at USF) and Content developed by the University of Washington.

Goal 2. Replace "dataset.toc" with MXF (Metadata Exchange Format) for metadata contribution. The move to replace the old dataset.toc with MXF is proceeding. Six libraries have had the MXF training; only four remain to be trained. The MXF acceptance is not yet fully automated, but FCLA staff say we are getting close. Software is available online. MXF supports Dublin Core and can be converted to MARC.

Goal 3.  Improve infrastructure services. The PURL server is now available and is being moved to two redundant servers. The service has been mentioned on the CAGER list, but some catalogers may still not be aware of it. The naming service has become of greater interest than originally thought and will be the focus of work rather than PURL enhancement. New statistics page will be linked to PALMM pages.

Goal 4. Improve support for text, image and multimedia. See Goal 1 above re: program for automatic markup and consideration of new image server software. The Florida Heritage Collection will be moved from its current server to the full text server when the new version of the software is received. It was suggested that we move the support of oral history and other multimedia to the third year since there is no current demand. USF is working on oral histories linking video and transcripts.

Goal 5. Augment support for metadata creation and maintenance. There has been no real demand for the OCLC SiteSearch RecordBuilder support for non-MARC data. It may be that folks are more concerned about the migration of to the new LMS. It was mentioned that the MetaLib module which handles non-MARC records was not part of the SUS contract for the LMS; however, the community colleges have included it in their contract. Planning for the future of QF and QC files has slipped as the migration schedule for the new LMS is delayed. Encoded Archival Description support will be developed in relation to the EAD pilot project in the coming year.

Goal 6. Provide robust naming services.  See Goal 3 above.

Goal 7. Provide central archiving services. FCLA will probably get approval from the Directors to move forward on creating a dark (non public access) archiving service. Any software tools developed will be made available to all members. The archive will be free now, but later may depend on cost recovery under an annual agreement with each university which uses it.
          No decision has yet been made on which formats will be stored, but an action plan for each format which will be accepted for storage must be developed. Currently the plan is to archive only those formats which are considered archival themselves or which are well documented for migration. In addition, consideration is being given to those formats which are not archival (e.g., Excel spreadsheets) but which can be made into a more persistent migration object. Intellectual property rights for items accepted for archival storage must be owned by the university or by faculty members who give permission for inclusion.

Goal 8. Provide electronic publishing services. FCLA hosts the electronic versions of a small number of faculty-edited ejournals. Member institutions are requested to find out what e-journals are being published on your campus to help to determine interest in providing this service. The Mellon Foundation funded an e-journal archiving project to see if it would be possible to develop a standard DTD. A recent report explains rather why everyone is using a different one. See the report at http://www.diglib.org/preserve/hadtdfs.pdf. See information at the Berkeley Electronic Press page (www.bepress.com) for information about software developed in the University of California system and services offered by BEPress.

Other matters. The "ancient ISSN" problem seems to be resolvable. If you have dead serials which need ISSNs for cataloging purposes, send a list of them to Erich Kesse who will request that the ISSN office at LC create ISSNs for them. This will only work for items which are ceased and the publisher no longer exists. The ISSN office requires that the publisher request the ISSN if it still exists. This would include municipal and university publications. There is no hard deadline, but Erich would like to have the lists before ALA in January.
          We need to add interest in the Open Archives Initiative to our 3 year plan radar. OAI is a protocol for metadata harvesting, that is, it allows you to search the metadata of a set of items rather than the full text. Because it is Dublin Core based, information exchange among systems is made easier.

Planning  for the LSTA grant
          Carla Summers, Ken Wells, and Betsy Simpson attended this part of the session to report on progress on the cataloging portion of the FCLA LSTA cataloging project. Ken Wells, who previously worked for FCLA and has a library degree from USF, has been hired by UF as the project cataloger. He and Betsy are requesting copies of finding aids in either paper or electronic format which can be used as part of his training. It is also hoped that he may be able to do a lot of work at UF and travel to the libraries primarily to do clean up work.
          Each institution should refer to the LSTA proposal to be reminded of how many collections it has said it wants cataloged and begin to get the list and the finding aids or other descriptive matter together. It was noted that each institution had asked to be last on Ken's list to visit. The cataloging will be done in NOTIS, and the records will be reviewed by the contributing library. Each institution will be responsible for uploading its records to OCLC so the records will have the correct location code on them.

Florida Heritage and PALMM

Budget requests: Several institutions asked about an extension of the Budget Request deadline. The deadline has been extended to January 18, 2002. Erich Kesse will send out contact information for a commercial vendor who does fulltext preparation so interested parties can contact them for cost information.

Review of content: Priscilla Caplan sent out the url for an IMLS paper "A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections." She was the chair of the group which put the paper together, and they are soliciting comments on the report.   See http://www.imls.gov/pubs/forumframework.htm

The proposed review of content against standard bibliographies suggested last year never took place. It was suggested that we investigate hiring  Dr. Mark Greenberg from the USF Resource Center for Florida History and Politics to do the review, identify gaps,  and suggest bibliographies that could be used as selection tools. Maggie Doherty and Larry Heilos are following up on this.

The much desired digitizing of Sanborn maps for Florida is on hold while we wait for legal opinions on our chances of being sued for digitizing material we believe to be in the public domain.

Publicity and Promotion: Erich Kesse shared copies of a terrific wall calendar with illustrations from the PALMM collection pages created by staff in the Digital Library Center. Someone suggested that similar looking bookmarks be created for promotion of PALMM in public libraries and at our reference desks. Erich and Priscilla Caplan will put some promotional materials online which can be downloaded for local use. Some materials may be produced in large quantity for distribution across the state. Flier mailings to academic departments were suggested;  Anjana Bhatt and Priscilla are working on creating the fliers. Erich will submit our projects to the ARL digital initiatives database (http://www.arl.org/did/index.html). Creating educational modules for K-12  was discussed, but no action was suggested at this time.

Each institution should check its own OPAC to make sure there is a catalog record for Florida Heritage (and other PALMM collections?) Erich is checking with the CAGERs about this. It was suggested that the "dog and pony show" about Florida Heritage be worked into a standardized Powerpoint presentation which could be used with groups. We want to encourage presentations about Florida Heritage at any and all meetings and conferences which people attend. Priscilla will follow up with Ken Wells who may have additional suggestions for promotion. Stephanie Haas will follow up on promotion of the fulltext collection Florida Territorial Laws.

Suggested Improvements: Priscilla Caplan and FCLA staff will work on developing a Z39.50  compatible broadcast search across all the PALMM collections and possibly Florida Memory, the State Library's digital collection. She will also be drafting guidelines for cataloging prospective and related collections which are to be added to the Florida Heritage database; also a draft "related collections" page for Florida Heritage similar to that on the PALMM page. Notify Priscilla if you know of collections that should be considered.

Please remember that records in the database can have multiple code collections in the 852 tag. This allows them to appear in more than one PALMM collection.

It was recommended that the FHC display be modified to show the name of the owning institution at the top of each page.

Partnering with Non-SUS Institutions: It was decided that there should be written guidelines for partnerships with non-SUS institutions so everyone is clear on what kinds of collections may be added and what standards must be followed in the creation and uploading of bibliographic records, metadata creation, etc. There will be a conference call to discuss this. Please contact Erich Kesse, Anjana Bhatt, Walter Rowe, or Megan Waters if you are interested in participating in the call or have suggestions for the guidelines.

Grandfathering Existing Digital Collections into PALMM: Anjana Bhatt requested that the group discuss this since she has a collection which is not in the currently used format (pdf only, no tiff) but has cataloging records and fits well into our overall schema. It was decided that the records can be derived into the QC database after being upgraded to meet CAGER guidelines, including geospatial codes and contents notes as needed. The possibility of converting the pdfs into tiffs will be investigated.

Miscellaneous: Group consensus is that we should ask the Directors to change our name to Digital Services Planning Committee since our interests and responsibilities have expanded far beyond simple digitization projects. Lucy Patrick will forward a proposal for their consideration.

The meeting was adjourned. Erich Kesse and his staff gave a tour of the Digital Library Center to those who had time for it.