The Sum of the Parts

T

HE

S

UM OF THE

P

ARTS:

Turning Digital Library Initiatives into a Great Whole

Keynote Address to the Joint

Conference on Digital Libraries

Denver, Colorado, 8 June 2005

Deanna B. Marcum

Associate Librarian for Library Services

Library of Congress

Washington, DC

The Sum of the Parts: Turning Digital Library Initiatives in a Great Whole

JOINT CONFERENCE ON DIGITAL LIBRARIES – JUNE 2005

Announcement from

“. . . the future of the library is that there is no library -- at least not as we know it today

. . . the always-on Millennial generation is knocking on the workforce door in everincreasing numbers with expectations that are further rocking the floorboards of the enterprise.”

Outsell, Inc., “TrendAlert: Google’s Impact on Libraries,”

InfoAboutInfo Briefing , vol. 8 (April 15, 2005): 10.



“The Infinite Library”

“If you’re over 30, today’s libraries are probably nothing like the ones you remember ... Enter any major library today and you’ll find an armory of computers and a platoon of specialists, from the reference librarians who are expert at accessing online resources to the acquisitions officers who decide which books, CDs, DVDs, and subscriptions to purchase, to the computer geeks who keep the building’s network running.”

Wade Roush, “The Infinite Library,” MIT Technology Review (June 2005): http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp

, pg. 5.



A Decade of Digital Library Projects



American Memory – 3.4 Billion Hits



Global Gateway – International Projects



Prints and Photographs Online Catalog



Veterans History Project



Library of Congress Exhibitions



A Comprehensive Digital Library?

 American Memory Digital Collections

 Global Gateway International

Collections

 Prints and Photographs Catalog

 Veterans History Project Collections

 Online Exhibitions and Wise Guide

 “Born Digital” Collections

 911 Digital Archive

 StoryCorps Oral Histories

 Mali Manuscripts



Same Trends in Research Libraries

 Grant driven project development

 Projects proliferated in library, IT shop, and

“in the wild”

 Virtual education and scholarly communication

 DSpace at MIT… a newly developed digital repository created to capture, distribute and preserve the intellectual output of MIT.



Research Library Digital Projects



More than 600 “public access collections”

 Yale’s database for Biblical scholars

 U. of Washington’s 19th- century actors collection

 U. of Chicago’s dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi, and English

 U. of Southern California’s East Asian maps

 U. of Minnesota’s stereoscopic views of India

More digital projects are continuously added by research libraries here and around the world.



European Efforts to Coordinate

 Conference of European National Librarians

TEL -The European Library

 Launched March 17 by 9 participating libraries

 11 million digitized items from 150 collections

“The European Library exists to open up the universe of knowledge, information, and cultures of all Europe’s national libraries.”



Project Aquifer: Digital Library Federation



Project Aquifer: 3 Phases

1.

Access to digital collections of participating institutions through a collaborative portal

2.

Develop or enhance special services for users

3.

Make “deep sharing” possible

 Access to contents of multiple digital libraries’ collections

 Ability to modify and redeposit collections for local purposes



Summing up the Decade

 Digital library work began a decade ago

 There was much experimentation, from which libraries have learned a great deal

 Libraries have produced many unconnected products and projects

 New initiatives are beginning to bring individual digital libraries together through portals

 Special services are making it possible to reuse digital library content in new and exciting ways



Is Something More Ambitious Possible?

 Could The European Library and the Digital

Library Federation successfully come together in coordinated access systems?

 Can the dream of a universal collection become a reality?

 Does digital technology make a universally accessible collection possible?

A library of all the world’s resources, accessible to all the world!



Making the Dream a Reality

 Is the “universal digital library” achievable?

 How could we create universal access to the libraries of the world?

 What would it take to provide electronic access to library resources for all from everywhere?

We can make the dream a reality if we do

four major things…



1: Update Copyright Regulations

 Legal restrictions to access are “fencing the commons of the mind”

 Contents of digital libraries are largely “public domain” materials

 Author’s lifetime + 70 years was upheld by the

Supreme Court in 2003

“…contractual licenses are supplanting copyright laws, with content owners mandating more restrictions on who uses resources and how these resources may be used.”

-- Association of Research Libraries




 Library consortia can hold down costs of licensing digital commercial databases

 ALA and others are trying to prevent further expansion of intellectual property rights and further erosion of “fair use”

 Librarians and scholars are developing new

“open access” resources






2: Ensure Long-Term Preservation

 Digital media may deteriorate substantially within five to thirty years

 Digital media can be rendered unreadable due to obsolescence of hardware and software

 Migration of data to new media and systems can prolong the life of digital library resources

 We must be able to make online access perpetual in order to achieve more than a short-term payoff for the substantial investment made in digitizing the world’s libraries



2: Ensure Long-Term Preservation

 National Digital Information Infrastructure and

Preservation Program (NDIIPP) created in 2002

 Architectural model for federated digital preservation

 Plan for preservation research and development

 Research grants totaling $3 million awarded:

 University of California San Diego (2 grants)

 University of Maryland

 Drexel University

 University of Arizona

 University of Michigan

 Old Dominion University

 University of Tennessee at Knoxville

 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

 Johns Hopkins University



3: Link Libraries and Digital Collections

 Activities of the Digital Library Federation:

 Collection-planning framework - activities required to plan and build specific collections for online use

 Tools for data mining, metadata enrichment, and other technical activities to help “curators” develop focused collections for specialized user groups

 Semantic analysis, thesaurus representation, protocols for interrogation

 Digital filestores, repository options, access controls, and rights management approaches



3: Link Libraries and Digital Collections



4: Find More Funding



4: Find More Funding

 Funding is needed for mass digitization

 Google “print” will pay for digitizing and provide access through search

“most librarians and archivists are ecstatic about the announcement, saying it will likely be remembered as the moment in history when society finally got serious about making knowledge ubiquitous.”

Wade Roush, “The Infinite Library,” MIT Technology Review (May 2005): http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_library.asp?p=1



If society can “make knowledge ubiquitous” the benefits will be enormous!



The Sum of the Parts

HE

UM OF THE

ARTS:

Turning Digital Library Initiatives into a Great Whole

A library of all the world’s resources, accessible to all the world!

We can make the dream a reality if we do

four major things…

If society can “make knowledge ubiquitous” the benefits will be enormous!

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The Sum of the Parts

HE

UM OF THE

ARTS:

Turning Digital Library Initiatives into a Great Whole

A library of all the world’s resources, accessible to all the world!

We can make the dream a reality if we do

four major things…

If society can “make knowledge ubiquitous” the benefits will be enormous!

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