James Shulman
Executive Director
ARTstor


ARTstor, an initiative of the Mellon Foundation to create and distribute a library of digital images for educational purposes, will be testing its content and service at a number of museums, colleges, and universities in the Fall. The update will focus on ARTstor’s progress to date in collection building, community relations, delivery issues, licensing terms, and plans for the Fall testing and beyond.

Vicky Reich
Director of LOCKSS Program
Stanford University

The decentralized, cooperative, preservation and archiving model embodied in the LOCKSS Program capitalizes on the traditional roles of libraries and publishers. The open source software enables institutions to locally collect, store, preserve, and archive Web-based journals, thus safeguarding their community’s access to that content. The model enforces the publisher’s access control systems and, for many publishers, does no harm to their business models.

The LOCKSS Program is moving towards implementation by:

• Building production quality software
• Exploring best practices for collection development
• Specifying collection management requirements, including metadata
• Founding an Alliance for longer term support of the program

This session will outline the current status of these activities and frame the community’s next steps.

Stephen Vaughn
Professor
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Modern technology gives us the ability to create a virtual archive that could capture the intellectual life of the university for any given year in an unprecedented way. Yet vital information that might be of great value to future generations is often not being collected, and what is collected faces the prospect of rapid deterioration and inaccessibility because the technology with which it was created has become obsolete. Several generations of important research are in danger of being lost or seriously imperiled.

At the University of Wisconsin, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication has created an electronic archive that makes the Schoolís history much more accessible to students, faculty, and alumni. Future goals include adding additional J-School records to this archive, connecting the archive to the archival holdings of other departments on campus, and eventually building a network of departmental and faculty archives with many other universities.

David Bearman
President
Archives & Museum Informatics

Jennifer Trant
Partner & Principal Consultant
Archives & Museum Informatics

In 1997 the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) was formed to enable educational use of museum multimedia. After five years, more than four million potential users have access to the digitized portions of the collections of 39 member museums. The massive potential scale of this enterprise, and the delicate balance of interests that must be maintained among academic users, museums, rights holders, and data distribution functionality make the enterprise an important laboratory. AMICO’s position with respect other initiatives in this arena will be directly adfdressed.

Mark Korhbluh
Director of MATRIX
Michigan State University

Dean Rehberger
Associate Director of MATRIX
Michigan State University

Michael Fegan
Senior Project Manager of MATRIX
Michigan State University

The recent emergence of online digital archives has brought educators a major step closer to bringing original, reusable digital objects into undergraduate classrooms. Yet having to search multiple archives through mind-numbing search-and-browse routines can make it difficult for educators to use the repositories successfully in their curriculum. The Spoken Word Project, a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), proposes to create complex digital objects by reducing the search for relevance, expanding the metadata with user-specific annotation, and tying the libraries’ content directly to course materials. The key to creating these resources will be to build distributed networks of users and repositories.

Cost containment often severely limits the amount of descriptive metadata that can be catalogued. Students and instructors will create topical annotated bibliographies or lists of media clips (or segments of media clips) and “publish” these for class, work group, or more general use. Allowing teachers and students to annotate and segment media as well as build their own galleries greatly enhances the educational value of digital objects by augmenting the minimal descriptive metadata and facilitating the building of complex digital objects tailored to the needs of specific education standards and curricula. The project uses a METS XML schema that provides an encoding format for administrative, descriptive, and structural metadata that is fully compliant with OAIS, and Cocoon applications to facilitate ingestion and delivery.

Maria S. Bonn
Director of the Scholarly Publishing Program
University of Michigan

The CIC Electronic Publishing Venture (EPV) is an attempt to bring together University Presses and University Libraries to consider alternative distribution systems for Press content. In the past year, the EPV has tested models for content delivery, but more importantly has explored a number of cultural and economic factors that need to be considered if the partners are to work together successfully. This session will report on the work done to date and the future plans for the project. It will also discuss more broadly some of the dififculties of Library-Press collaboration and some strategies for overcoming those difficulties.

Rodney Petersen
Director, IT Policy and Planning
University of Maryland

This session will review the results of NSF workshops on security and privacy held in the fall of 2002. General recommendations in the areas of education and awareness; policies, procedures, and standards; security architecture and tools; and information sharing and incident response will be put forward.

Chad Kainz
Senior Director, NSIT Academic Technologies
University of Chicago

What started in 1998 as an unfunded ìgood willî study by the Biological Sciences, John Crerar Library, and Networking Services & Information Technologies to define a next-generation public computing cluster has, in five years, transformed the relationship of central IT and the Library, redefined the role of public computing on the University of Chicago campus, and enabled new ideas on how technology, content, expertise, and space relate to one another.

This briefing will highlight the issues and themes behind the USITE/Crerar Computing Cluster & CyberCafe, review the outcomes, and look at how it has influenced current thinking on the role of technology and space both within the Regenstein and Harper libraries and across campus.

Donna Dinberg
System Librarian/Analyst, Government Online Task Force
National Library of Canada

Jeffrey Penka
Manager, Cooperative Reference Services
OCLC, Inc.

Digital reference services constitute a new but rapidly growing extension of the traditional reference service offered to users of information services, and enable cooperation in delivery across the library, archival, museum, and corporate communities. While the service may be delivered via real-time chat or asynchronous e-mail/Web mechanisms, the essential characteristic of the service is the ability of the user to submit questions and to receive answers via electronic means. These reference services are being implemented at a rapid pace as small local cooperatives, statewide networks, nationwide (but for particular sectors), and even globally. NISO has undertaken a project to develop protocols that will enable interaction between separate network reference services or domains in order to broaden their effectiveness.

This session will describe the motivation for this work, the potential applicability and value of a protocol standard, how the standard is evolving, and expectations for trial use.

Sayeed Choudhury
Hodson Director
Johns Hopkins University

Tim DiLauro
Deputy Director
Johns Hopkins University

This session will present research on a fully automated robotic system for on-demand and batch scanning of print materials (CAPM) and an open-source software framework for document analysis that can be trained and calibrated by humanists (Gamera). The resulting system will include an inter-linked mechanism between CAPM and Gamera. To evaluate different techniques for document analysis, including Gamera, we will build a testbed of digital images. Gamera will be usable designed according to the principles of usability which include effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.