This session will provide a review of the work and recommendations of the Arizona State University Task Force on Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Topics to be addressed include: student submission and workflow processes and digital preservation for text and multimedia. Discussion will focus on costs, methods, and institutional commitment to digital preservation.

PowerPoint Presentation:
Archival Considerations for ETD’s

Beth Forrest Warner
Director, Digital Library Initiatives
University of Kansas

Numeric and spatial data is created, purchased, and stored by various units in universities today. Access and resource efficiencies are not possible without implementing an infrastructure for resource identification and sharing. To facilitate the location, access, and analysis of numeric and spatial data, the University of Kansas has formed the Academic Data Research Services Alliance (ADRSA). ADRSA is a cross-division collaboration of KU units with a shared interest in access to quality data, computation, education, and consulting resources. Coordinated as a project within the KU Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) program, ADRSA is a cooperative venture involving the Libraries, Academic Computing Services (ACS), and the Policy Research Institute (PRI), which leverages expertise in content and computational analysis to better serve the University. KUís approach to data services provides a model that engages a broad campus community efficiently and results in a service that provides improved access and service to clients.

The large-scale deployment of learning management systems (LMS) throughout higher education in recent years raises far-reaching questions that have yet to be defined or addressed in a systematic way. Key questions include: 1) How long does a class site remain a living document? 2) What is included in the “record” of a class? 3) How long is this record kept? and 4) Who has access to this record, and under what circumstances? This session, based on a recent paper for the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR), will explore these questions and their complex implications for institutional policies–from intellectual property rights to records management to documentation of scholarship.

The full text of the ECAR paper is available in

PDF format: Adobe Acrobat 5.0

and Adobe Acrobat 4.0

or in Word format

Greg Zick
President
DiMeMa, Inc.

The Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) comprises the 15 college and university libraries in the state of Utah. Earlier this year the UALC funded a plan to create the Mountain West Digital Library. The goal of the Library is to put unique materials online in an integrated seamless manner that will provide a single point of access to these geographically distributed collections. Four centers established at the largest universities have a mandate to create digital collections and support the efforts of smaller libraries, museums, and historical societies in their geographical areas. The centers provide fee-based scanning, then return digital files to the client institutions, which add metadata and upload the files to one of the four centers’ CONTENTdm servers.

The challenge was to develop a system that allowed three layers of participation: 1) collection builders, 2) server providers, and 3) users searching multiple sites. To accomplish this UALC worked with the CONTENTdm software suite made by DiMeMa, Inc. With cooperation from the state library in the administration of LSTA funds toward this effort, a sustainable model of statewide digital library development is well underway.

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a pioneer in the use of electronic information technologies to extend library collections and services. Operating under the administration of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), DLF brings together libraries, government agencies, and other interested organizations to identify standrds and “best practices,” to coordinate research and development of electronic information technology, and to assist libraries in creating and implementing new projects. In this session, incoming Director David Seaman will introduce his plans for the Federation and provide an overview of current and new initiatives.

Mairead Martin
Director, Advanced Internet Technologies
University of Tennessee

In September 2002 several organizations, including CNI, sponsored an NSF Middleware Initiative and Digital Rights Management (DRM) Workshop at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The goals of the workshop were to explore Research and Education requirements in the DRM space, consider how those requirements might be unique, and suggest how they might be met. This session will not only report on the discussion and outcomes of the workshop, but also will present an overview of the key issues in the DRM landscape today.

Michael Seadle
Head of Digital and Multimedia Center
Michigan State University

The library portion ofthe Digital Library Initiative (Phase 2) National Gallery of the Spoken Word project has used XML-based Encoded Archival Description (EAD) to organize spoken word recordings ranging from 30-second Edison cylinders to multi-hour oral histories. While EAD is well suited to the organizational task, it is too complex to serve as the primary discovery tool. To facilitate discovery, portions of the EAD record are harvested into MARC (for loading into the online catalog) or into Dublin Core (for Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting). The challenge is not to find a single correct mapping, but to define dynamic relationships that meet evolving needs.

Jeff Merriman
Project Leader, OKI
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc. (IMS) and MIT’s Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) are both working to define Internet architectures and standards for teaching and learning, bringing together a diverse group of thinkers from universities, government, and commercial enterprises. This presentation will address the current and planned efforts to support digital repository (DR) functionality within the IMS and OKI efforts and will describe the collaborative activities underway between IMS and OKI. Participants will gain a better understanding of the IMS and OKI DR efforts as well as identify opportunities to participate in specification, best practice, and implementation development.

The rapid increase in the quantity of visual materials in digital libraries–supported by significant advances in digital imaging technologies–has not been accompanied by a corresponding advance in image retrieval technologies and techniques. Digital Librarians are currently without tools for evaluating either content-based or metadata-based image retrieval systems. They have difficulty assessing existing systems of image access, evaluating proposed changes, or comparing metadata-based to content-based image retrieval. Benchmarking has been proposed as a possible solution to this problem of comparison. CLIR and CNI have supported the exploration of these issues.

This session will report on the activities of the CLIR/CNI project to date. We’ll review the components of a possible Image Retrieval Benchmarking Service and explore the strategies that might serve to develop the service and a community of researchers whose work would ultimately improve digital library service.