While it may seem redundant to post this amidst the flurry of activity on Twitter (follow hashtag #dpla) and in other media, I’d like to let PLA blog readers know that the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) site is now live.  It’s an exciting step forward for an ambitious initiative which holds a lot of promise for public library patrons during our changing times.  As a convening member of the audience and participation workstream and as a true enthusiast and supporter of this project, I’ll be posting updates and thoughts from time to time on the PLA Blog encouraging public libraries and librarians to join the conversation and to help make the DPLA something useful, inspiring, and valuable for their communities.

I believe that the first iteration of the DPLA will be an intentional, measured venture into creating a semantic web for all things ‘cultural heritage’, and that it’s underlying structure and standards are going to let libraries, museums, and archives put their metadata and assets on the web in such a way that fabulous new discovery, social, and remixing tools (and the developers who build such tools) will have access to them.  What does that mean?  That means it’ll be much easier for professionals or even hobbyists to build interfaces and curate collections like Old SF, an amazing local history site built from resources at the San Francisco Public Library.  It means that projects like LibraryCloud can ingest your data and make it available through the fascinating social discovery interface called ShelfLife.  It means that you can use slick and powerful curatorial tools like extraMUROS to do even simple things, like building slideshows of library and web content for an iPad on the fly.  It means a lot of different things, but something that I know will resonate in the under-resourced public libraries that haven’t been able to invest in a lot of in-house tech staff: it means the technically inclined individuals in your community will be able to leverage their own skills to make the library better.  And when they make their library better, they make their community better.

That’s a powerful concept.  Public libraries empower their users by providing access to knowledge, traditionally for consumption.  The DPLA will make our cultural heritage available not to consume, but to parse, sort, analyze, visualize, remix, and redisplay.  Perhaps the next iteration of the DPLA might be supporting knowledge production and content creation, but there’s an awful lot of work to do first.  First we need a framework and a few ground rules.  Here we go….

Look to the DPLA Blog for more news.
Check out another post over at Hack Library School.
Get info about the upcoming meeting in Washington DC , Oct 21
Look at the amazing Beta Sprint projects.

The meeting began with a bit of history. In December 2004, when Google was rolling out lots of products, it announced Google Print, a project to make full texts available for reading and printing from the web. Within weeks the company also announced that it had agreements with five large libraries to digitize their printed materials and make them searchable on the web. Many librarians thought the idea was great, but publishers and authors objected. The upset parties filed lawsuits against Google and the libraries. In Fall 2005 the project was renamed Google Books.

Adam Smith, the Product Management Director of the Google Book Search summed up the status of the project. As of June 2007, there are 25 libraries scheduled to join the project, whose goal is making searching books as easy as searching the web. He also said that around 10,000 publishers had signed on to provide content at differing levels. Some have full texts, some sample pages, and others snippets with keywords. He said that Google Book Search had been integrated with Google Universal Search, and showed that special “About This Book” pages combining metadata, reviews, book backgrounds, and library holdings are being added to Google Book Search.

The five libraries are Harvard, University of Michigan, New York Public, Stanford, and Oxford University’s Bodleian. Their panelists indicated that libraries themselves have differing objectives, but all admitted they signed on because they were failing to digitize at fast enough rate before Google made its tempting offer. Though the number of items digitized to date is being treated like an industry secret, they all claim that they are much farther along than before the web giant stepped in.

The obvious benefit for the five is items are being made digitally available. There are many side benefits. The work has forced the libraries to pull out seldom used materials. They have discovered items that were never catalogued or added to online database. The Bodleian even discovered many books whose pages had never been cut. They have to varying degrees discovered how damaged their books are by time and usage. (Brittle and breaking spine items are not being scanned.) They are getting new ideas for bibliographic description and finding new ways to share their resources.

Several of the panelists said that Google Book Search is sparking requests for materials in a way that being part of other online catalogs never did. This is where public libraries benefit. Because full texts are searchable, subjects are being found in books that researches had never considered.

The program became more interesting when the audience began its questions. Some of the project’s disappointments began to be revealed. Much was made of the limitations of sticking only to public domain known items for digitization. To be safe, several of the libraries have stuck to pre-1923 books. One speaker said that many 1923-1964 books are now in the public domain but no one knows what titles, as no one has ever reported on copyrights not renewed. The University of Michigan has a team now systematically checking 1923-1964 copyright renewals. It is estimated if these books can be identified, the body of public domain items will double.

The panelist also admitted that the quality of the digital documents is not good enough to be considered preservation. The goal is just to make the items searchable on the web. At this, the project is successful already. What lies ahead is uncertain. One panelist said that until much copyrighted material can also be added and open for reading and printing, the project is not really complete.

I’m writing to suggest a library link for your blog. I’m a librarian at the Finkelstein Memorial Library in Rockland County, New York, north of New York City. One of our patrons and her mother donated her late father’s drawings to our library and we have made them available online.

[Link to the collection]

It’s an interesting story. David Friedman was a Holocaust survivor. Friedman documented his agony and torment during the Holocaust through a powerful series, “Because…They Were Jews!” While he was working on this series he found comfort by visiting local libraries and sketching the people he saw. Timeframe: 1962-72.

Friedman’s words: “I needed to forget about the concentration camps and the horror that was there. So it was a pleasure to go to the library.” There’s a poignant human interest story here; showing libraries as a place of relaxation and sanctuary.

I would argue that this is more than a lovely human interest story. This is an example of librarians telling a story, something that Karen Hyman so often speaks about, a low-tech option for offering digital photos (fast-loading HTML, thumbnails for quick viewing, an HTML slideshow that simply refreshes the page and doesn’t require a special plug-in), and definitely taking content from the community and presenting it to the rest of the community in a new and interesting way. It’s providing context for content and communing with patrons. That’s Library 2.0 if I’ve ever seen it.

In case you don’t know, LII is just what it sounds like–an index of high-quality websites compiled and annotated (and regularly checked) by librarians. You can browse through the 14 main topics and over 5000 subtopics, or you can search for a specific topic (more on that later). LII currently contains over 19,000 websites, and new ones are added each week. If you’d like to get a sampling of the new sites added each week, you can subscribe to “New This Week,” which comes out every Thursday and is available by e-mail or RSS. This past week’s issue included sites about ” money, insurance, climate change, contrails, crop diversity, John Cage, the Sears Tower, Spain, sunscreen, shell collecting, zinc, business etiquette, California authors and Washingtonian bloggers.” LII frequently features California (and sometimes Washington) specific topics because they receive funding from those states.

Each web site indexed by LII has its own page on the site. Here’s one I’m particularly interested in, being a pale-skinned person in a sunny, high elevation climate: How Does Sunscreen Work?. If you look at the page, you’ll see that there’s a description of the site, including what it covers and who produced it, with some other details sandwiched in between. In the upper right hand corner there is a little series of icons which let you do handy things like print or e-mail the item, or send a comment to the librarian who indexed the item. If you do a search, you’ll see another little icon next to each of your results–a magnifying glass. Clicking on that gives you a page like the one above–the complete metadata for the item, including who indexed it and what topics LII has indexed it under. Some entries also contain Library of Congress Subject Headings. As you can see, the topics are linked, so that if you want to see what else LII has indexed under that heading, you can do so with just a simple mouse click.

LII is browseable, but it’s also searchable, and later this summer, LII will be rolling out its spiffy new search engine, which uses Siderean and will provide faceted searching of LII content. Eventually, LII users will also be able to tag and rate the content on LII. Several audience members were a little apprehensive about the idea of user ratings. Wouldn’t they undermine the work of the librarians? Karen talked about user ratings as an added enhancement, and how sometimes the wisdom of the crowds can provide information that otherwise would not exist. As an example, she discussed her recent search for a video camera that would do a good job of recording in low light. Consumer Reports doesn’t rate video cameras on that criterion, but Amazon.com reviews turned out to be very helpful. Other audience members chimed in with how they use user ratings on travel sites or on Epicurious.

If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, you’ve probably read innumerable debates on taxonomy vs. folksonomy and the wisdom of professionals vs. that of ordinary people. It was fascinating and illuminating to watch a mostly non-blogger crowd working their way through some of those same arguments (even if they weren’t using the same terms) and to see them realize that they already use some of both, and that the answer can be both/and, not either/or.

Laurie Thompson
Why create an archive digitally? Preservation & dissemination. It’s one of the best ways to share materials that are fragile or hard to access.

1. Assess the materials and the community (and the intellectual of the items in the collection). Good for
   • oral histories, ephermera, historical photos and maps
   • gear archives towards what the population wants and is interested in, outreach opportunity
   • can items be digitzed safely? Are they fragile? Can they be scanned? Will they be damaged with exposure to light? Speaker notes that it’s generally accepted that exposure to light one time won’t damage materials.
   • Copyright issues, speaker mentions “mine field, suggests websites librarylaw, US Copyright Office, public domain chart check agreements with donors and make sure that future agreements you make with donors allow web access to items
2. How to Sell the Vision
   • Make it a special collections project
   • get staff and volunteers who know the stuff to help out as well as help promote
   • preserve rare materials and use the archive as a fundraising tool
3. Equipment
   • scanner, image and audio editing software, Adobe Acrobat, word processor
   • server, computer, monitor, sound card
4. Use it as a fundraiser and to get more grants
   • foundations and civic groups
   • start small and use them to talk about the history of your community “peopel respond on a deep level to images from the past”
   • LSTA grants (they got one for metadata creation)

Sarah Houghton

1. Design Process
   • didn’t want to use the stock County website look and feel, but got someone from the County to buy in to the project
   • went with their own look and feel, background, buttons, etc
   • “you can grab what is already out there, mix and match”
   • uniform look and feel, nav bar and standard footer with library logo, uniform layouts per page
   • PDF and HTML format for text information, so you get a fancy and an accessible version
   • Added Google search, easy, free, fast
2. Workflow – figuring out who does what and when
   • Photos: Special Coll. needs to do their work first: choose photos, catalog with metadata, scan, check the info, re-arrange, write captions, make web-ready (in the future they would have a database-driven model S. says to take better advantage of the metadata)
   • Photos: Webmaster: creates the pages incl. thumbnail pages, move to server
   • Audio: Special Coll staff – backup audio file, backup on server, transcribe interview (time consuming!), choose audio clips, write bio essays
   • Audio: move files to web server, making new web page for oral history and transcript in HTML
3. Publicity
   • library blog
   • email newsletter
   • email to all staff before it goes live
   • ling off library’s main site if appropriate
4. Techie Stuff
   • Make choices that work on all computers, simple simple simple
   • Accessibility: variable fonts, ALT tags for images, reads with a screen reader, W3C standards
   • Online findability, very very important because your collection is unique, get listed in search engines, get visible

Laurie continued with a tour of the site, pointing out some highlights of it, including a feature where they take audio excerpts from some of their files and use them as “answers” to questions that they list, faqlike, on that page. She finished with a what we’ve learned section

1. Laurie: Digital archives require a commitment of time and resources
2. Laurie: maintaining the archive is more labor intensitive than creating it (this didn’t make sense to me) I think she means that it’s an ongiong committment and shoudl be staffed appropriately.
3. Laurie: train staff appropriately and give them training from experienced professionals
4. Sarah: people find these images from search engines and link to them with their blogs
5. Sarah: limitations were due to both an overworked e-services librarian and built in limitations from using county servers (no CSS, no flash originally, etc)
6. Sarah: Next step is database-driven site
7. tips: back-up all digital files.
8. tips: work closely with city IT staff
9. tips: make staff members digital archivist and project manager