Content: or, a Tale of Mass and Malleability

1
Content or, a Tale of Mass and Malleability

• David Seaman
• Executive Director, Digital Library Federation
• Managing Digital Assets A Primer for Library and
  Information Technology Administrators
• Charleston, February 4-6, 2005

2
Digital Library Federationhttp//www.diglib.org/

• Thirty-three members major academic and
  national libraries, including The British
  Library five allies (CNI RLG OCLC LANL JISC)
• Created in 1995 by directors of US research
  libraries fills a need not simply met by larger
  library organizations focus exclusively on DL
  needs for large academic libraries
• Nimble, agile, collaborative
• Practical and strategic areas of activity

3
Finding Order in Chaos (embrace the churn)

• New library disciplines still solidifying new
  skills sets and work habits
• Tipping points -- when does a new item move from
  irrelevant to surprisingly non-terrible to
  indispensable? And how do you know?
• Non-library arbiters of access to scholarship
• Ambition, Ignorance, and Lack of Money
• Seismic events are routine and continuing
  Mosaic eBay Amazon Google wireless blogs
  wikis
• METS OAI TEI XML DRM EAD MODS

4
New content streams, environments, and
opportunities abound

• Buy, Rent, Build, Link, Stumble across (and never
  find again)
• Online and offline
• Courseware systems and objects
• Digital Library Content and Course Management
  Systems Issues of Interoperation
  http//www.diglib.org/pubs/cmsdl0407/
• Institutional repositories
• Faculty projects, presentations, databases
• Richer consortial and grants opportunities

5
New content acquisition issues

• Rental of our core collections journal
  subscriptions
• No teeth to permanent access clauses
• Ongoing maintenance costs what happens in lean
  times?
• Growing license management challenge
• DLF response -- Electronic Resource Management
  Initiative (ERMI) http//www.diglib.org/pubs/dlf
  ermi0408/

6
Mass (http//www.digitalpromise.org/)

• Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO-IT) 20
  billion digital gift to the nation.
• Digital Library Federation, the American Library
  Association, the Association of American
  Universities, the Association of Public
  Television Stations, the Association of Research
  Libraries, the George Lucas Educational
  Foundation, and EDUCAUSE endorse it, and senior
  personnel from eBay, Google, IBM, the Internet
  Archive, RealNetworks, and 3Com all in planning.
  
• Whatever happens with it, its arrival on the
  scene in 2001 spurred us on to think about what
  we would do in the face of a massive public
  investment in digital content, tools, evaluation,
  and learning systems.

7
Mass (not if but when and by whom)

• US Government Printing Office print documents
  conversion 2.2 million items
• Carnegie Mellons Million Books Project
• Library of Congress and a group of international
  libraries from the US, Canada, Egypt, China and
  the Netherlands to make one million books
  digitally available on the Internet (Dec 2004)
• Google Scholar Google Print. Massive digitizing
  of library material, in and out of print
  (Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, Michigan, NYPL).
  Seven million books agreed to from Michigan
  alone.

8
Digital Production

• Regularized production within the institution
  from ad hoc projects to continuous process
• Regional production centers
• DLF/OCLC Registry of Digital Masters
• Standing orders pipelines and centralized
  production units
• Special Collections materials a focus of this
  activity
• A very long tail surprising usage for materials
  that have no use in print when locked in academic
  libraries Rufus Dawes, Nixs Mate 6,000 MS
  Reader and Palm ebook versions shipped of this
  novel, August 2000-August 2002 (excluding HTML
  use).
• Strong library/faculty partnership opportunities

9
Faculty project examples (a few of many)

• Mark Twain in His Times http//etext.lib.virginia.
  edu/railton/
• Uncle Toms Cabin and American Culture
  http//www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/
• The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive
  http//www.salemwitchtrials.org/
• The Valley of the Shadow Two Communities in the
  American Civil War (http//valley.vcdh.virginia.ed
  u/
• The Roman de la Rose http//rose.mse.jhu.edu/

10
Content standards

• XML (and its predecessor SGML) great potential
  for re-use example
• XML is a core standardized document format -- XML
  is nimble it makes re-shaping content easier,
  even to formats you do not anticipate UVA xml
  to MS Reader and Palm ebook formats 7 million
  free ebooks shipped in the first two years
  (August 2000-August 2002) to over 100 countries
• TIFF and GIF/JPEG for images
• Audio and video firming up
• Good guidance available on preservation and
  production practices (DLF PADI NARA New
  Zealand National Library)
• Need to know for collection building, grants, and
  projects accidental ephemera a bad thing

11
From Isolation to Integration

• Every publisher (and library production unit?) is
  an island we produce silos of data that plays
  badly with others. A good silo is a lovely thing
  but not sufficient always.
• Libraries dont shelve by publisher and users
  dont work this way runs counter to our normal
  patterns of behavior.
• Little ability to work with content (and often
  with metadata) cross-publisher and
  cross-aggregator.
• We build product that can only appear on our
  terms, in our interfaces, in our tools, on our
  site.

12
Bend it, shape it rip mix burn

• Malleability We need digital library content to
  be much easier for us to re-shape for local
  customized delivery and analysis.
• Mixability we invite our users to visit sites
  and watch content channels (TV) they want to
  sample, re-use and re-package as a personal
  library, a classroom presentation (the music mix)

13
Aquifer

• DLF Strategic Goal a Distributed Open Digital
  Library http//www.diglib.org/aquifer
• New level of interdependence
• Two-phase Finding System, initially OAI
• Digital Object Sharing for richer library
  services and better scholarship
• New infrastructure and data creation needs what
  are the characteristics of sharable content?

14
Closing

• Need to think strategically and focus on our core
  mission to advance pedagogy and scholarship
• Any library that can be replaced by Google,
  should be.
• The transformation from isolation to integration
  is our central challenge and opportunity with
  some enormous payoffs when we get it right.
• Innovative users need malleable content with
  which to innovate need to learn to re-shape
  content in a mutable library.

15
Closing

• Standards abound, and we are getting better at
  applying them in ways that work across
  institutions
• The days of competing on access are over
  context, services, convenience, cataloging,
  research skills, long-term thinking are our edge.
• Collaboration is not just a nice thing it is a
  survival mechanism
• Managing digital content over time is a tough
  business and we are equipped to do it.