hangingtogether.org

I just learned from Max – our Wikipedian in Residence – that NARA (the US National Archives) is postings scans of archives on request and putting them up on Wikipedia. This pilot project is my new favorite creative experiment to maximize access to archives. The project page includes links to digitized images, with crowd-sourced transcriptions. Check out the example of a George Washington letter posted and transcribed. There’s a list of scans NARA has posted and the queue of requests.

What a creative experiment delivering digital images! I wish I known about it when Dennis and I were chatting on YouTube about scanning and photography in special collections.

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, digitization, Rare Books, Wikipedia | No Comments »

There is not often much in these posts about public libraries, but there are frequently posts about digital libraries. I admit to thinking there’s not all that much overlap between the two. Public libraries are ready to change that.

Last November a group of public library leaders met to begin to address the future of public libraries as information is increasingly digital. There was much discussion about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the role of public libraries in that endeavor — as well as the possible impact of DPLA on public library usage and funding. It was agreed that this was not a time to sit back and see what happens. If public libraries don’t serve the content the users want in the forms they want to consume it, their future is grim.

A new report, America’s Digital Future: Advancing a shared strategy for digital public libraries, summarizes the themes from the meeting and lays out an action plan for moving forward.

There can be no true Digital Public Library of America without the participation of public libraries. Public libraries are eager to digitize their unique materials and make them locally available as well as contribute them to DPLA. Perhaps a more burning issue is to ensure that public libraries can provide current commercial publications, including e-books, to their users. They cannot rely on the marketplace to represent public interests; this will require a national, concerted voice to negotiate with publishers and to minimize the digital divide.

This part of the public library action plan is being further pursued in an IMLS-funded project to develop an e-book strategy that will ensure that Americans continue to have access to commercially produced content through their local public libraries, even as formats change.

While OCLC’s constituency includes all libraries, the OCLC Research Library Partnership focuses on research libraries. These issues, though, are fundamental to all libraries and library users and I am pleased to have been involved in the public library meeting and report and in the forthcoming work on e-book lending.

Posted in digitization, ebooks, Libraries | 3 Comments »

Discoverability of special collections has long been a top concern of the OCLC Research Library Partnership.  What works? Break out of the OPAC? Beyond MARC? End run around EAD?

Constance recently started a conversation here in the office about “catablogs.”  She’d seen that NYU’s Chela Weber taught a workshop in New York about how to use a blog as a low-overhead collection management system.  A “catablog” can create searchable, browseable online presentations of collections.

Today the Atlantic posted a short article about the impact of blogging rare books. At St Andrews, Daryl Green’s blog played an unusual role in what are otherwise standard special collections procedures – identifying new acquisitions and raising scholarly and financial support. (Book-nerd disclosure: I’ve been following Daryls’ blog for his 52 weeks of fantastic bindings, but Constance sent me the Atlantic article this morning.)

Ellen’s blogging about collections in ArchiveGrid is driving a healthy amount of traffic to ArchiveGrid itself. This is exactly the kind of research question we wanted to pursue with ArchiveGrid. Bruce has wondered if commentary and interpretation wouldn’t improve discovery and make it easier for a researcher to decide what to pursue.

This has prompted me to revisit The Metadata IS the Interface and user studies of relationships between description and discovery or use. Archivists and librarians contribute to discovery when they discard illusions of neutrality and express their excitement for the materials and their opinions about their significance. MARC and EAD have enhanced our management of collections, but don’t necessarily serve all the needs of our users these days.

Over on the RBMS-ish (rare books and manuscripts) side of our profession, considerable thought has been given recently to more rich description – “records more like sonnets,” as the Beinecke’s Ellen Elickson put it. I might borrow a term from the anthropologist Cliff Geertz and call it “thick description.” Michelle Light and Tom Hyry have advocated post-modern colophons and annotations. One of the RBMS hipsters has been arguing it is time to bust out of “the coldness of our description.” Mark Dimunation (Library of Congress) and others have imagined meaty and flexible descriptions of special collections like a wheel: hub and spoke. Merrilee blogged about Mark’s talk:

“Dimunation has been intrigued by James Asher’s call for progressive bibliography in which catalog records are viewed as hubs where information can be linked in, or hung on the core record as necessary. In this way, additional information can accrue over time, and doesn’t necessarily need to be contained in the catalog. Links to information that lives outside the catalog form a virtual vertical file that can document unique characteristics, and help form the fingerprint of an item.”

When I first joined OCLC Research, in the days of Shifting Gears, I thought that I’d wasted the past 10 years of my career building curated web exhibits of boutique collections of rare books, manuscripts and archives. In 2007 we needed to scale up digitization. Now my thinking is coming full circle. Curated blogs and exhibits, combined with the voice of the librarian/archivist, accomplish exactly what we’ve always wanted – to make collections visible and increase their impact.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, digitization, LAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums), Rare Books, Renovating Descriptive Practice, Visual Resources | No Comments »

After several years of work, the ARL Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Academic and Research Libraries is out. I was particularly eager to read the Code for two reasons. First, I have long admired the work of Peter Jaszi and his colleagues at American University’s Center for Social Media who have been instrumental in producing several “code of best practices for fair use” documents for documentary filmmakers and other creative communities. Second, I strongly suspected that digitizing unpublished materials would turn up as one of the top challenges for academic and research libraries. And indeed, one of the eight scenarios addressed by the Code is creating digital collections of archival and special collections materials.

I was pleased to see that the Code and our own “Well intentioned practices for putting collections of unpublished materials online” (or WIP) are quite complimentary. Despite the fact that the Code was developed using what sound like Chatham House Rule and our discussions were conducted in the open, the two documents do not differ much in spirit. WIP downplays fair use in favor of managing risk (and outlines simple practical steps for doing so), whereas the Code makes a strong case for institutions to consider that collections are more than the sum of their parts, and these aggregations themselves may be transformative. It’s a powerful argument and also underscores the value of the work that librarians, archivists and curators everywhere do to build collections.

As a general observation, this is the first of the “codes of best practice” that has not only had a set of “limitations,” for each scenario but also “enhancements.” According to Peter Jaszi and Brandon Butler from ARL, the enhancements were added because librarians approach fair use with a good deal of caution. My fear is that librarians will read the “enhancements” as “requirements,” which would set us back in terms of making progress on what is perceived by some as a large digitization backlog. However, I do believe that this document should give additional courage to the community to digitize unpublished materials.

ARL and other organizations have been taking the Code on the road, and their have already been a number of webinars and in-person events so there are plenty of opportunities to learn more. As was said in one of the webinars, fair use is a muscle — if you don’t use it it will wither!

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, digitization | No Comments »

The US Copyright office has recently issued a paper, Priorities and Special Projects of the United States Copyright Office. The paper outlines some areas that the office will be working in over the next two years. One of these projects has already resulted in a “white paper” on the mass digitization of copyrighted books. Although this piece of work is receiving a lot of attention, I’m more curious about another strand of planned work, a study on a “small claims solutions for copyright owners.” From the paper:

Copyright law affords a bundle of exclusive rights to authors, including the rights to
reproduce, distribute, publicly display, and publicly perform their creative works, or
license others to do so. However, these rights are meaningless if they cannot be enforced.
As the ease of infringement has risen, so too has the cost of federal litigation. At the request
of Congress, the Copyright Office is conducting a study regarding alternative means of
resolving copyright infringement claims when such claims are likely to involve limited
amounts of monetary relief.

[More information here]

I worry that creating a means to more easily sue for infringement will have a negative impact on institutions who are considering digitizing materials held in special collections, using a risk management approach (as described in the Well-Intentioned Practice document). Since the study won’t be completed until 2013, it’s too early to worry. However, it’s not too early to formulate a response! Those are due January 26, 2012, which is right around the corner.

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, digitization, Risk management | Comments Off

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