Minutes

Barbara reported that the Management Council meets on the 12th and the Board meets on the 26th. Our first report is due tomorrow, but we need also need to give the Board the results of our meeting on Tuesday (primarily, the specific project proposals). We will submit those to her before the Management Council meeting on the 12th.

For our first report, Sarah will add the agenda for the meeting on the 10th, and then send the report to the BLC office. Mac reported receiving many questions about a BLC digitization project. It was agreed that there is a lot of interest for such a project, but also a lot of questions. Barbara asked the task force to ask for these questions at the meeting and give the list to the Board.

The task force had a discussion about action items 2-5. Various aspects of standards and metadata, technology, and funding were discussed. It was agreed that these would appear more clear once we choose our projects. In order to start work on these as soon as possible, it was agreed that the task force would stay an extra half hour after the meeting on the 10th. At that time a couple difference task force members will take the lead on each remaining action item.

The task force also discussed the workshop. Barbara suggested looking at the suggestions from last year to get ideas for this year. Susan remembered that many people asked for something more concrete and hands-on. Metadata seems to be a possible topic.

• Committee Chairs: Jennifer Varney & Sarah Tudesco (Co-Chairs). Bill Ross volunteered to assist.
• Action Item #1 (from the charge): The committee has agreed as the Gilded Age (loosely defined as 1877-1914) as the broad topic for our digitization proposals. This topic was chosen because collections related to this time period are of interest to independent funding agencies. We will develop 2-3 project ideas within this broad category.
• Collecting Special Collections contacts from BLC member institutions: Barbara Preece suggested emailing the Director's listserv. Sarah Tudesco will develop a draft email by Tuesday, Jan. 6th. Our goal is to get the email out by Wednesday. Melissa Petze from the BLC will collate the data. The BLC site already has information about current digital projects (www.blc.org/task_forces/FY03/digitization/di_website.html). However, many institutions did not provide contact information.
• Meeting of Special Collections Librarians
  • Place: Northeastern University (Melissa Petze)
  • Date and time: Jan. 28 / 1:00-3:00 (following the BLC Celebration)
  • Agenda: Jennifer Varney will develop a preliminary agenda which the group will flesh out via email.
• Important Dates:
  • February 5, 2004: 1st committee report due.
  • February 12, 2004: BLC Management Council
  • February 26, 2004: BLC Board Meeting
• Action items #2-4
  • These include standards, recommended technology, identifying possible funding partners.
  • The group decided we could not really beginning substantive discussion of these issues until after the meeting with Special Collections staff on Jan. 28. However, individual members of the task force will be responsible for initiating discussions of these items at that meeting, so we will discuss/assign these items via email. There is a lot of information on the web discussing these issues, best practices, metadata standards, etc.
• Meet with Marion Carney/Endeavor at ALA Midwinter? Bill Ross volunteered to attend the Digital Breakfast.
• What's happening with Nelinet (New England Collections Online)

Barbara brought the meeting to order and reviewed the documents provided for the task force members. She noted that Mark Sandler's digitization proposal was provided for informational purposes.

Merrily gave some background to the group and discussed the task force's charge. Essentially, the BLC Board of Directors is very interested in beginning a collaborative digitization project, and the task force's charge is to make that happen. She noted that for various reasons, collaborative projects haven't taken off in the New England region as they have in other parts of the country. She also noted that ARL is working on an initiative to enhance access to special collections and will be focusing on three specific subject areas: The Gilded Age (turn of the last century), women, and advertising.

Jennifer L. and Dee Brennan (who attended to fill in for Jennifer L., who needed to leave early) announced that the BPL has just been awarded a planning grant from the MBLC to investigate and hopefully begin a Massachusetts statewide digital repository. They will be working with NELINET. Can or should our project work with theirs?

A discussion ensued about various options for the infrastructure for a digital project and what might make the most sense for the BLC. Would the BLC staff run a server and provide database support, or would BLC manage the project and outsource the technical duties? Barbara said that the BLC has a history of outsourcing technical aspects of projects, and she suspected that would be what would happen in this case.

Other decisions to make include deciding between a model of one repository, where all content and metadata would be stored together; or a distributed model, where metadata will be harvested or a federated search performed, and the results would simply point to content which resides elsewhere. Greg noted that disparity among the member institutions would probably result in a combination of the two models.

The task force discussed subject themes for content and tentatively decided that "The Gilded Age" would be good to move forward with. Advantages are that most if not all of the member libraries would have content in this area, it fits in with the ARL initiative and would be a subject area of interest to funding agencies, and most of the content in this area would be old enough to be in the public domain.

In order to identify possible collections to include, the task force talked about inviting BLC Special Collections staff to a meeting to discuss this project, and to see who would have appropriate collections and be willing to participate. There is no existing COI for Special Collections; we will need to identify the appropriate people at each institution.

The task force discussed a general timeline. Grant proposal deadlines usually are in late-winter to early spring. We won't be ready by the 2004 deadlines, so we hope to have the BLC grant-writing group start writing the grant next fall and submit it in 2005. We may wish to self-fund a small pilot project in the interim to prove that our idea can be done. This may involve 2-3 institutions and may simply collect and deliver material that is already digitized. It would be good to have this up and running by June, before the grant writing process begins. We noted that if we would like to invite Special Collections staff to a meeting we would not be able to make our first deadline, scheduled for December 9th. We pushed this back to February 5th.

Other things the task force will need to consider: collection development policy (including whether or not someone will approve each submission), standards and guidelines, process, etc.

Consider who in Special Collections to contact and how.
Pilot project: who will participate?
Team structure: will we have a chair or co-chairs? Those in attendance would very much like Heidi Abbey to reprise her role as chair. Will we continue to try to meet virtually as much as possible?