Coordinating Committees

Digital Initiatives Status Report and Future Vision: 2008

November 6, 2008

To CUWL Members:

It is with great pride that, on behalf of the DICC, I present for your review, the attached document, Digital Initiatives Status Report and Future Vision: 2008.  This has been the product of several months of work and is in direct response to the charge given to this committee in July 2007.  I wish to thank all members of this committee for their contributions.   As you read through this report, I draw your attention to several key points:

  • Our digital content is truly global in its reach as it is accessed from various places on the Internet.  Wide spread harvesting of our records makes discovery of an increasing portion of CUWL content possible from popular search engines such as Google and specialized sites such as OAIster.  

  • Still, many opportunities exist that would allow for the integration of our digitized collections into a host of new and different portals.  Constant innovation on our part must be made to achieve a high level of “ambient findability” of our unique content. 

  • To make this happen, UW System digital programs must, in part, develop robust flexibility in how content is ingested, accessed and packaged.  Investing in platforms and tools that allow for modularization of content will create a more efficient work flows as well as make for more seamless research across collections and formats. 

  • Assessment activities and research and development are crucial to allow for improvements to the digital activities of CUWL libraries. 

  • To allow our repository program to grow and be meaningful to our faculty, full services as opposed to self mitigation, is key.   This shift requires additional human and technical resources at the UWDC to allow for a total integration of the MINDS service. 

  • Over the next year and beyond, issues of digitizing copyrighted and “sensitive” materials will need to be addressed by the DICC. 

  • The challenges of digital preservation will continue to a source of strategic planning on the part of UW System digital staff and the DICC. 

Thank you for your time in reviewing this report; I look forward to presenting it to you in person on November 11, 2008. 

Sincerely,

Joshua Ranger
Digital Initiatives Coordinating Committee Chair
Forrest Polk Library
UW Oshkosh

Digital Initiatives Status Report and Future Vision: 2008

Prepared by the Digital Initiatives Coordinating Committee
Submitted to CUWL, November 6, 2008

Introduction:

The history of digitization activities in UW System libraries spans a single decade, from the creation of the Wisconsin Electronic Reader to the establishment of the Digital Initiatives Coordinating Committee (DICC).  In that time, UW System libraries have joined together to plan, support and execute most of its digital activities in a collaborative fashion. Through this group effort, vast amounts of research material have been made accessible on-line providing UW System students, faculty, and staff a unique and effective way of using our digital content. Add to those individuals all of those researchers and enthusiasts around the state and beyond who find our materials by way of the harvesting of our records through specialized sites like OAIster or popular search engines such as Google. In this first decade of digitization for UW System libraries, however, no attempt has been made to develop a plan for how to proceed with these new activities. There could be no better time for such planning. New developing technologies and funding realities place System digital activities at a crossroads. This status report and future vision document attempts to describe the current digital projects within UW System and identify and address crucial changes and issues that must be considered to remain a viable part of the digital library community. 


I. Digital Activities in UW System Libraries:

Despite the large and widespread nature of its libraries, UW System’s digital programs are highly centralized by design. Within System, most large-scale digitization activities are done under the auspices of one of four programs: the UW Digital Collections, MINDS@UW, the Wisconsin Historical Society* and UW Milwaukee’s digital collections. There have been some smaller-scale digital projects completed at other UW institutions, most notably, UW La Crosse, but also at Oshkosh and Stevens Point, but these are largely experimental or small-scale efforts and have not detracted from the shared financial support of the UWDC. In fact, by reprioritizing budgets to make digitization a fully realized program within their institutions CUWL members have helped ensure the lasting success of those activities. Rather than relying on project funds that have plagued other attempts nationwide, the digital programs of CUWL members have endured and have grown more responsive to faculty and student needs.  

This centralization of digitization activities has achieved economies of scale and concentrated expertise and equipment that have yielded important advantages. It has, for example, allowed the UWDC to partner with external agencies and institutions, most notably DPI’s Division of Libraries, Technology, and Community Learning. All three programs have combined efforts to help create and support the Wisconsin Heritage On-line, along with DPI and WiLS.

The following is an overview of the major digital programs and their responsibilities and activities:

UWDC

With more than 1.4 pages and files in their holdings with 7.2 million recorded research sessions in FY 2007/08*, the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections began very modestly. The program began as an initiative of CUWL in 2000 to explore how to best approach digitization of unique library materials. This came at the same time the UW System Archives Council was considering the digitization of popular archival collections for undergraduate users. The two initiatives were combined to explore the needs of faculty vis-à-vis digital content and the best way to fund and accomplish in-house digitization activities. In time, the exploratory committee decided that a central digitization center and servers at UW Madison (which already existed and was renamed the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center or UWDCC) was the best approach and System funds were made available to help fund the center.  In September 2001, the first meeting of the newly created UWDC oversight committee was held. At the same time, UW Madison continued adding to its own digital collections (which began in 1997 with the Wisconsin Electronic Reader) concentrating on its own collections and those of its faculty.

The first two UWDC pilot projects involved archival collections. The first project digitized photographs, books and full oral histories of Belgian Americans in north-eastern Wisconsin drawn from the collections at UW Green Bay. The second included first person narratives from 19th Century Wisconsin and included materials from all of the Area Research Centers of UW System as well as the Wisconsin Historical Society. Both of these projects involved formats that UW Madison had not worked with before and, at the time, were largely unseen in many other digital projects nationwide.

In 2001, UW Madison, formally added all of its own content to a newly re-designed UWDC site, eliminating the distinction between the two programs. The UWDC celebrated its 1 millionth image in September 2005. The collections includes books, government documents, maps, audio and video recordings, paper archival records, conference reports, photographs, EAD finding aids and other materials in a wide variety of subject areas, with emphases in Wisconsin history, environmental sciences and decorative arts. The UWDC seeks project proposals from faculty, librarians and archivists. Collecting is widely eclectic but must have student (primarily UNDERGRADUATE) research and instruction potential.  

 In 2005, the UW Digital Collections Center (or UWDCC, the central service provider in Madison) agreed to work with DPI’s Division of Libraries, Technology, and Community Learning in its LSTA re-granting program that sought to help public libraries digitize research materials. DLTCL reviewed proposals from libraries and awarded funds to digitized proposed unique content. These funds were principally paid to the UWDCC to reformat the materials and add these to the UWDC’s giant “Wisconsin Collection” for access. 


UWDC is responsible for:

  • Consultation, advising and collaboration with librarians and faculty across the state regarding digital collections issues.

  • Digitizing, hosting and preserving unique research content belonging to UW System libraries, faculty and staff where copyright can be secured or is not an issue. As of FY07, UWDC hosts over 1.4 million pages, photographs, audio files, and other digital objects in nearly 40 collections.

  • Serving as a digitization service agency for DPI’s LSTA digitization grants funded. 

  • Creating and maintaining the Wisconsin Heritage On-line metadata server and portal.

 
MINDS@UW

The Multidisciplinary Institutional Networked Digital Storage at UW (MINDS@UW) program was created by CUWL in 2003 as a way to preserve scholarly output and disseminate material not supported by traditional print media publication. Unlike the other digital activities discussed above, MINDS@UW does not seek to convert non-digital research material to digital files but to set up a trustworthy storage facility on-line for already digitized material. As an institutional repository, MINDS@UW provides each UW library the opportunity to help curate the materials of its faculty, staff and students that might have previously entered into the library in print form (theses), archival collections (faculty research materials) or not at all. STRESS SELF ARCHIVING SERVICE.

Compared with the UWDC, MINDS@UW is much more decentralized. Each campus--as well as certain departments--form “communities” in which material is stored. And while a single office supports the program, much more work is required of the individuals wishing to add content. Under the current service model, faculty or campus librarians acting on their behalf must do much of the work necessary to put materials into the repository. This appears to be a factor in MINDS@UW initial slow development. 


MINDS@UW is responsible for:

  • Hosting and preserving SCHOLARLY OUTPUT of faculty, staff and students of UW System. Currently over 7,000 items are stored in the repository.

  • As of FY07, users have contributed over 2100 articles, papers, photographs, and other content to 50 collections.


UWM Libraries - UW Milwaukee

Active participants in the creation and administration of the UWDC, the UWM Libraries also formed its own digital program, delivering its first on-line collection, the Harrison Forman Collection of photographs of Afghanistan, in 2002.  The UWM Libraries' digital collections include projects that draw heavily from the collections of the American Geographical Society Library and the Archives Department. In 2007, the UWM Libraries received funding from UWDCC to support EAD markup of existing finding aids of UWM archival and manuscript collections. Those finding aids have since been added to Archival Resources in Wisconsin, a union database of finding aids of collections located in repositories throughout Wisconsin.


UWM Libraries is responsible for:

  • Digitizing, hosting and preserving unique research content belonging to the UW Milwaukee libraries where copyright can be secured or is not an issue.  To date over 32,000 items have been added to UWM Libraries’ collections.

  • Marking up finding aids of UWM archival and manuscript collections in EAD, and contributing them to Archival Resources in Wisconsin. To date, UWM Libraries has contributed 430 finding aids.


Wisconsin Historical Society

WHS began experimenting with digitization in 1998 with the publication of the Wisconsin Roster of Civil War veterans. Like UW Milwaukee, WHS developed their own digitization capacity while contributing counsel, materials and, later, EAD coding services to the UWDC. WHS completed a major digital project with American Journeys collection, funded largely by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under a 2003 National Leadership Grant. To create this collection of first person narratives from early explorers of North America, WHS used contentDM management system, the platform it has used for several other of their digitized collections. For several years, WHS has served as an out-sourcing service agency for the UWDC in the creation of EAD finding aids. 

Wisconsin Historical Society is responsible for:

  • Digitizing, hosting and preserving unique research content belonging to WHS where copyright can be secured or is not an issue.  To date over 300,000 page images. 

  • Serving as a digitization service agency for EAD conversion.

  • Serving as a content host facility for Wisconsin Heritage On-line members.

  • Provide substantial content to collections of the UWDC.


II. Trends

In the years since the founding of UWDC, users and uses of digital content have perhaps evolved faster than the infrastructures involved in their creation and management. The technology marketplace is still dominated by vertically-integrated applications ill-suited to adapt to new use patterns or opportunities for integration. In order for a digital library to continue to meet its users’ needs, it must be able to reach beyond its virtual walls and make itself available to users in their own environments. But those environments are dauntingly diverse, and it remains a challenge to achieve the “ambient findability” (in Peter Morville’s term) our users increasingly expect:

  • Though a number of (mostly repeat) users will come to the UWDC Web site to begin their search, those will be a minority. Content that cannot be located via Google, Yahoo, or other search services is essentially invisible.

  • An increasing number of users are coming to UWDC through referrals from online reference sources such as Wikipedia or subject-based portals; effort must be made to market our collections to those resources at a fairly granular level.

  • The Internet is continually providing more diverse means of access to content, whether geographically (i.e. Google Earth) or visually, through tools like Cooliris. An agile digital library will find ways to leverage these developments to make its content more accessible without having to redevelop its base infrastructure or take on new development. In many cases, a relatively simple repackaging of existing content is all that’s needed to project digital library content into these external environments.

  • An increasing number of courses are being developed within e-learning systems such as Learn@UW. While many of these systems include a content repository, those repositories are limited in scope to the course environment. Digital collections aspiring to more universal access must nonetheless be findable and useable within e-learning environments.

  • As faculty become more adept at developing digital learning objects, digital libraries must be able to integrate with a wide variety of authoring tools.

  • Although most digital collections focus on public domain materials, faculty tend not to choose their content based on copyright status. Digital libraries must find better ways to make copyright-protected works available to instructors and students, within the bounds of Fair Use.

  • Users are increasingly interested in reusing, referring, annotating, or commenting on online resources. Finding ways to foster the creation and dissemination of this “meta-content” not only helps users become more engaged with our collections, but also enriches the experience for other users.

MINDS@UW, like other institutional repositories across the United States, is seeking innovative solutions to accelerate adoption and deposit rates. As academic institutions gradually accept that the rates of faculty deposit will not significantly improve by themselves, the trend is toward the following:

  • Innovative ways to canvass article databases, disciplinary repositories, and the open Web for "archivable" material (e.g., the BibApp "institutional bibliography" software development project at UW-Madison's Wendt Library)

  • Innovative faculty-centric services such as online CVs kept up-to-date automatically by library searches (another service made possible by the BibApp) Adoption of mandatory archiving policies (such as the National Institute of Health's public access policy) and permissions policies (such as Harvard University's)

  • Library intervention much earlier in the research process: capturing grey literature, helping manage research data, etc.

  • Systematic electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) programs, with the institutional repository as storage and dissemination mechanism.

In a concurrent report to CUWL, the DICC’s (Digital Initiatives Coordinating Committee) Digital Repository Working Group makes several radical recommendations to accelerate the adoption and deposit rates among UW System faculty, staff, and students in the institutional repository. They include migrating MINDS@UW content to a new platform, decommissioning the MINDS@UW brand in favor of offering new services and solutions under the more successful UWDC brand, and exploring several funding models for the resulting services.

Since being introduced to the archival community in 1993, EAD has been adopted as a standard by the Society of American Archivists (August 1999) and implemented by thousands of repositories worldwide. As a mark-up language used to prepare finding aids for presentation on the Web, EAD has been implemented most actively by institutions with sufficient staffing resources and technology support (i.e., larger academic institutions and state historical societies). Institutions lacking these resources have also managed to implement EAD through consortial undertakings, joint projects, and other shared ventures (e.g., Online Archive of California, Northwest Digital Archives, and Rocky Mountain Online Archive).

In Wisconsin, EAD implementation was not originally conceived as a consortial activity, but has moved gradually and unevenly in that direction. The Wisconsin Historical Society began utilizing EAD in earnest in 2000, receiving technical support from the UW General Library System and publishing its finding aids online as the WHS Finding Aids Collection. In April 2007, UWDCC released Archival Resources in Wisconsin (ARW), a collection that incorporated the finding aids of WHS as well as UW-Madison Archives and Record Management, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, and Memorial Library's Department of Special Collections. In October 2007, UW-Milwaukee Libraries began contributing the finding aids of its collections to ARW.

The consortial nature of ARW should be celebrated, but not overstated. Participation thus far is limited to five repositories, with the bulk of contributions coming from two of those five. Despite efforts to encourage the participation of others, and despite the high likelihood of financial support from UWDCC to cover costs associated with encoding legacy finding aids, most UW campuses have shown little interest in contributing content, thus diminishing researchers' knowledge of the rich collections located in repositories located throughout UW System.

III. Technical Infrastructure

The current architecture of the UWDC reflects early decisions to create scalable platforms for the delivery of textual and multimedia resources. Since indexing, retrieval, and navigation of the full range of UWDC content was not supported by any single application, separate means of access were developed for text (whether facsimile or fully encoded), multimedia (images, audio, and video), and finding aids. Data dictionaries, workflows and user interfaces were developed for each content model, following standard metadata and encoding models (Dublin Core, TEI, EAD). When MINDS@UW was instituted, its self-service workflow and community authorization model necessitated the addition of yet another software platform (DSpace).

Current UWDC Architecture

Figure 1: Current UWDC architecture

The inefficiencies of this heterogeneous environment for user discovery and access are obvious, despite steps taken over the years to mitigate their effect. Moreover, the diagram makes clear that storage and file management functions are also being replicated across multiple platforms, each with its own idiosyncrasies. To some extent, this situation is not surprising: digital content applications have historically been (and, generally speaking, still are) developed as vertically integrated platforms, managing the digital object life cycle through content creation, storage, and user access. When an institution needs to handle a new type of content or develop a service not already handled by an existing application, it has to either wait for the developer to develop support for that feature or acquire a new product.

In recent years, however, the technical landscape has changed dramatically, creating opportunities for a new generation of digital libraries. The most significant aspect of this new environment is its modularization: specialized tools have been created to support various aspects of workflow, storage, indexing/retrieval, and object display. While some of these tools have been created to work together as vertically integrated solutions, they are increasingly becoming interoperable and interchangeable. This holds the promise of allowing UWDC to consolidate some of its architecture and, in the process, provide users with more unified access to content.

Proposed UWDC Architecture

Figure 2: Proposed UWDC architecture

In moving to this infrastructure, UWDC will be able to manage its content within a single repository, developing both workflow and user access as services layered over that base. The most promising technology for the central repository is Fedora Commons [cit], an open source platform developed originally by Cornell University and the University of Virginia. This will also greatly facilitate the proposed integration of MINDS@UW with the rest of UWDC, and better prepare the entire platform for digital preservation efforts.

An additional benefit of moving to this architecture is to give us much greater flexibility in defining aggregations of content. In most existing systems, each digital object belongs to a single collection, and while search may be provided across collections, any single object can appear in only one context. In detaching collection building from storage and management, objects will be able to appear in any number of collections, and the collections themselves could be arranged hierarchically as needed to provide users with multiple contexts for their searches. More importantly, object types will no longer determine the means of user access: it will become possible to search for full text, multimedia, and finding aids through a single index.

By providing central access to digital objects of all kinds, the new repository architecture should make it easier for UWDC  to share its content and services with external systems such as e-learning platforms or content authoring applications. This integration will work at both ends of the lifecycle: allowing for automatic deposit of new content for UWDC management as well as exporting UWDC content into other systems.

IV. User Needs

It is essential for comprehensive a digital plan to heavily factor in the needs of students and faculty for whom the programs serve.  

UWDC

Content Needs

In the early planning for the UWDC, a survey was sent to over 400 humanities faculty across UW System asking what they wanted to see digitized for classroom use. The response rate was approximately 20%. The responses were diverse. What little common ground was seen however suggested a desire for first person narrative accounts: primary, archival materials. Beyond this crude and early (in 2000, several academics didn’t know what was on-line already) survey, no comprehensive, systematic approach has taken place to determine just what faculty want from System digitization activities.  

The lack of focus on user content needs at the beginning can be attributed--in part--to the belief among UWDC committee that faculty suggested projects would soon overwhelm the capacity of the UWDCC.  This demand was slow to materialize and so the UWDC advisory committee created a series of projects it thought would be useful for undergraduate instruction and research. However, some form of faculty “buy in” was required for most projects that came from library staff. 

Today, production is nearly at full capacity, and increasingly more collections are recommended by faculty and academic staff. The program’s profile is much higher than in the early years and is better situated now to capitalize on word of mouth suggestions, translating these into fully realized projects quickly. Consequently, user assessment should focus as much (or more) on discovery and service needs as on the content of collections.

Infrastructure Needs

A far better use of resources in addressing unmet needs is to deal with the infrastructural issues regarding the UWDC’s online presence. The UWDC’s technical infrastructure has developed slowly over the years with occasional larger upgrades that have--in the eyes of the UWDC oversight committees and the UWDCC staff--have improved the user experience and brought the program more in line with current trends in digital libraries. That said, there has never been a systematic program to assess user satisfaction with the interface and the assumptions built into it. Some recent research suggests there is some dissatisfaction among users with parts of the interface. A fully realized assessment program is required for the UWDC to make the necessary changes and improvements to its user experience so that the program will remain relevant and competitive in the marketplace of ideas and content.  

The lack of assessment is not due to a lack of concern among the UWDC oversight committees or the UWDCC staff but rather due to the prevailing “production” mode the program has operated in for the last seven years. This focus on digitization has produced impressive results, with 1.4 million page images in the collection, catapulting the UWDC to one of the nation’s leaders in multi-format digital materials collections. However, the UW Madison staff and the DICC now believe that it is imperative to divert some of the attention of the UWDCC staff to assessment. Toward these ends, the DICC has authorized the use of a portion of the System funds previously earmarked for production to be used to create, implement and analyze and assessment of the UWDC at large. While a portion of this will involve content, the focus of the assessment will be to capture user satisfaction and expectations of their experience using the UWDC materials for research and instruction. The assessment will target faculty and teaching staff and undergraduate and graduate students. This assessment program will be the first project of a permanent research and development program at the UWDCC (see below). 

Most remedies to problem areas with the interface discovered through the assessment process would likely require substantial changes to the underlying infrastructure of the UWDC. It is important to understand that while unknown the costs of these changes may be substantial. The changes will involve investing in new hardware, software and specialized programming. To meet identified new service needs required by our users, such infrastructural improvements will be as--if not more--important than adding any new content. 

Service Needs

In addition to the delivery of digital content online to researchers, the UWDCC also provides other services, mainly to content providers and System library staff. The UWDCC has also served as a service agency to non-system partners through DPI’s LSTA digitization grant program. No systematic assessment has been attempted to determine how the UWDC’s customers value these services. This situation is common across ALL System library service providers, and it is the belief of the DICC that the UWDCC staff provides a high quality of service. Still, the UWDC has a responsibility to periodically survey its customer base to determine if there are areas of improvement they can make with their services as well as glean ideas of new services that the group might be able to provide. It is planned that such an assessment will take place after the technical survey is completed. 


MINDS@UW

Content Needs

Because MINDS@UW is self populated by its users, the issue of content needs is different than in the case of the UWDC.  In fact the term “user” differs as well.  In an institutional repository there are two distinct types of users: the contributor, who is using the repository to preserve and share research materials of their own; and the researcher who discovers and makes use of this content. In the latter case, the appetite of the world wide user is insatiable and difficult to measure. The scholarly output of University of Wisconsin researchers is diverse and highly sought after. The only way to meet even a portion of the needs of the researcher is to encourage the first type of user, our faculty, to share this content. Based on the experience of MINDS staff, there are major impediments to this and much of that is based on technical and service needs of those individuals. 

Infrastructural Needs

Currently MINDS@UW is different in many ways from the UWDC and no where is this more evident than in the way materials get added to the collection. MINDS is a self populating repository. While the staff can assist in setting up a collection and provide support, it is ultimately up to the faculty or staff member to upload and describe the content they wish to share. This activity requires familiarization with an online application (to many of your faculty, yet ANOTHER online application to learn). Since little customization is available with the DSpace platform, assessment on the user satisfaction with the MINDS interface may be premature. The very future of DSpace itself is uncertain and the DICC recommends exploration into other technical infrastructures available that will help fulfill MINDS service needs. 

Service Needs

Measured by participation among UW System faculty and staff, MINDS@UW has not enjoyed the success that was hoped for. This trend is seen across academia, however. To be relevant to faculty, staff and students, it is recommended that MINDS de-emphasize the “repository” notion (that is user driven) of the program and to develop a “service suite” that will expand on existing services, providing more of the mediation, training and preparation of materials common to UWDC projects. To provide these services, the DICC recommends that the MINDS program be fully integrated into the UWDCC and that the MINDS brand be discontinued. In an integrated environment, the digital repository (MINDS) and digital library (UWDC) content could be discoverable in the same context with groupings of content (by subject, provenance, etc.) easily created for granular searching.


V. Research and Development (UWDC)

The concentration of the UWDC on production from the beginnings of the program was discussed earlier. This focus was appropriate for a new program that needed to develop a “critical mass” of material to prove concepts and develop a user base. In that time of UWDC’s rapid growth, the digital landscape has changed dramatically, and while some trends have been incorporated into the UWDC services, there are many other technologies, applications and practices that the UWDCC staff members have simply not been able to explore and test due to the demands of production.  In addition, the UWDCC has not been able to assess user satisfaction with the current product, services and collections made available to them.

The DICC believes it is imperative to the future of the UWDC, that such “research and development” activities take an important part in the day-to-day work of the UWDCC.  The committee recommends that a permanent portion of the support given by OLIT be earmarked for a R&D program at UWDCC staff. This will indeed REDUCE the amount of material digitized in any given year, but the DICC believes this is an acceptable opportunity cost to making the UWDC a better product. This rebalancing of priorities and resources requires a culture shift, not only at the UWDCC itself but within CUWL. 

The assessment activities mentioned above will be first phase of this R&D program. The user surveys administered in that phase will identify potentially new services for users, including but not limited to integrating materials into learning platforms; social tagging and other Web 2.0 capabilities. Such services will require new technology to support them. Thus future activities of the R&D program will include researching and testing technical solutions to the areas of improvement indentified through the assessment. R&D will focus on current and tested models; however some future forecasting will be part of their charge.

UW Madison will also contribute resources to this R&D program as well and it may be that UW Madison’s priorities and those of other System libraries on R&D will differ. Through the DICC, we hope, that these priorities can be balanced for good of all. Regardless, as System partners plan their digital collections future together, we must do so with a solid understanding of available options, best practices and emerging trends such as those outlined in section II above. Only a consistent research and development program will achieve this.


VI. Selection Considerations

Collection development within UWDC and MINDS@UW is a slightly different concept than that used in the management of traditional and subscription-based electronic resources. Both programs primarily look to our faculty, library liaisons and ARC curators to create collections. That said, through the solicitation and promotional activities of staff and the DICC, these programs have active roles in developing the collections. Also, like other library collection development activities, the DICC foremost works to build collections that meet our USERS’ NEEDS. From its earliest days, the UWDC sought (through a statewide survey) the input from our users. Based on this input, in 2001, the UWDC emphasized Wisconsin cultural history and knowledge of the state’s physical environment and biodiversity as major collecting areas.  

In addition to written collecting priorities, there are policy issues that need to be addressed by CUWL that will also influence the collecting activities of the programs. In addition to the service changes to the MINDS program mentioned above, there two areas that require attention over the next several years that will help dictate collection development: copyrighted material and sensitive materials. In both cases policy needs to developed with our user needs in mind.   

Copyrighted Material:

Currently most material in the UWDC is in the public domain, while other projects have secured permissions to publish material in copyright, and in other cases content is made available under the Fair Use provisions of the copyright law.  In all cases, the UWDCC relies on the project managers’ claims to the legal availability of the materials to be digitized. This approach has not been a hindrance to production: the UWDCC is close to full production capacity and the UWDC has over 1.2 million page images online. Still, several projects have been turned down in the past due to copyright concerns that vary in level of legal risk.  It is clear that the UWDCC does not have the resources to investigate whether certain materials are protected by copyright nor those necessary to secure permissions for complicated sets of materials such as archival collections or serials. For the UWDC to continue to grow and to expand its collections, however, the issue of digitizing copyrighted materials must be addressed. Through the efforts of the DICC and the research and development activities of the UWDCC, we will explore technical options for limiting access to copyrighted materials as well as investigate legal issues, and draft policies regarding copyright and Fair Use.

Several initiatives by Google, OCLC, and others are under way to facilitate the task of determining the copyright status of 'orphan works', those first published in the U.S between 1923 and 1964. A number of libraries in the U.S. have expressed a willingness to devote staff resources to these efforts, which will document not copyright status per se, but rather the facts (about publication dates, authorship, etc.) upon which institutions can make their own copyright determinations. All of those engaged in these projects have announced that they plan to share their work openly with others.

Sensitive Materials:

In addition to copyright, the digital programs of UW System must also be sensitive to other legal issues when developing our digital collections. Privacy and confidentiality as well as obscenity and hate-speech laws must be taken into account when approving collections that might be considered “sensitive.” These could vary greatly from overtly sexual content, to racist literature, to simple photographs of children for which release was not secured. Ethical considerations may also be important at times when other types of “sensitive materials” are considered for digitizing. Responsibilities for the protection of unique cultural, historical or archeological sites as well as threatened or endangered species and their habitats should be give consideration in the project approval process. With an eye on present and future collections, the DICC will draft a policy that will help govern decisions regarding the addition of sensitive materials to the UWDC and MINDS@UW as well as options for levels of access to such materials when appropriate. The breadth of our audience dictates our added scrutiny.  We have a broad and diverse audience.


VII. Measuring Success

The future of the UW System digital programs will increasingly rest on our ability to demonstrate value for the investment UW Madison and System has made in these programs.  In an era of diminishing resources and ever-changing priorities, it is imperative that the UWDC and MINDS@UW can measure and effectively communicate their successes. Traditionally, this has been done--in part--through anecdotal stories about creative and effective use of the collections in research or teaching. In addition, traditional internet statistics have been captured that demonstrate website hits, searches, etc. While the collecting of this data and the narratives most likely will need to remain an important part of the process, periodic reports of data and its analysis should be created to provide stake holders with an understanding of the current status of the UWDC and MINDS@UW. This could be as often as biannually or annually completed by UWDCC and MINDS staff and presented to the DICC which could add its own narrative. 

Before any data can be analyzed and reports drafted however, the DICC (along with CUWL) and program staff must reach an understanding about how to define success in these digital endeavors. Some of this will be dependant on the data that can be feasibly gathered, however, there are larger philosophical issues that UW Madison and CUWL must agree upon. Through a careful planning and understanding of what defines success for the UWDC and MINDS@UW and a consistent and regularly scheduled program of assessment and analysis, UW System’s digital programs can be well poised to defend its success or identify further opportunities for improvement. CUWL’s 2007-2009 Strategic Directions provide an important framework for evaluating success, as each of its 3 main areas speaks directly to UWDC’s core mission and services:

1. Integrate information and services into learning environments
2. Build partnerships for learning and scholarship
3. Embrace innovation in services and operations

The process, however, for measuring success is labor and time intensive and traditionally there has been little opportunity for this among program staff. The redirection of some funds into a permanent R&D process will permit staff to redirect some time to these issues.


VIII. Preservation

The UWDC’s resources are managed on secure, high-availability servers with multiple levels of storage redundancy. While this protects our collections from a number of risk scenarios, there is currently no formal digital preservation program in place. To some extent, this is understandable: the rules of the game are constantly shifting, and there is a wide perception that developing and implementing a digital preservation regime is a costly and resource-intensive process. But as our collections continue to grow, the importance of preserving our investment in their creation grows as well. The decisions we make now, as we redevelop the UWDC infrastructure, must take preservation into account so we can begin to develop a preservation policy and outline the stages for its implementation.

This realization is embodied in the architecture proposed in section III above. By consolidating the storage of our content and metadata into a single repository framework, we can better focus preservation efforts. Further, by decoupling data creation and user access from content storage we can make decisions about the management and preservation of our content (including infrastructure improvements) without having to redevelop the rest of the platform or change our service model.

But preservation is more about policy than technology.  It has always been possible to make perfect digital copies of content, and lossless or near-lossless format migrations. But successful preservation depends on knowing what content is at risk (and from what), having procedures in place to migrate content to alleviate that risk, and – most importantly – institutionalizing those procedures as part of the regular business of the group.


IX. Recommendations

There is little doubt that, on the whole, the UW System digital activities have been a great success. From a consortia-wide perspective, UW System digital projects have few peers. And even among that elite group, UW System boasts a diversity of materials, formats, and approaches that rivals, while not in size, the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project’s ambitious variety. By relying on general purpose funds, rather than grants or program revenue, UW System has ensured sustainability to the program. Through this consistent investment, CUWL has developed an expertise among the its staff, especially at the UWDCC, WHS and UW Milwaukee libraries. These individuals bring diverse understanding on content, infrastructure and service issues. The relationships that have developed among these individuals help ensure the cooperation and understanding needed to conduct their operations independently but within a context of common interests and needs. Finally, by partnering with DPI and public libraries statewide, the UWDC is increasingly being seen as an essential public utility among that user base. 

All of this success, however, may be jeopardized if the digital programs of UW System fail to evolve and grow based on the knowledge of our users’ needs in terms of collections and their technical requirements in terms of interfaces, and expanded functionality.   To avoid a erosion of the market share of our collections and services, to remain a leader in world-wide digitization activities, UW System needs to consider the following:

1. Continue substantial system-wide program funding to remain a leader in digitization activities. One System, One Library.
2. Combine the MINDS AND UWDC programs under a single suite of services.
3. Research and Development activities become part of System support. 
4. Consolidate repository functions into a single architecture utilizing developing technologies.
5. Develop flexible user interfaces to take advantage of emerging technologies including Web 2.0 functionality.
6. Develop policies that address important selection issues including sensitive materials and copyright.
7. Begin digital preservation planning.
8. Begin Systematic reportage to help measure success.
9. Provide more effective integration of UWDC materials into learning environments.
10. Continue existing collaborations and look to develop new ones. 

As WHS has concentrated its digitization activities to library collections, this section includes WHS as part of UW System libraries digital activities.  

For details on UWDC statistics, please visit:  http://uwdcc.library.wisc.edu/usageStats/