code4lib NW: digital initiatives presentation

I'm going to be giving a talk at the code4lib Northwest conference on Monday and I thought that I'd put together my thoughts for it here. The theme is creating a digital initiatives program at a liberal arts college.

I believe that we're in the middle of a paradigm shift for academic libraries. As content shifts to the network and as discovery is disintermediated from the library, the work needed to support the library's traditional roles as buyer, archiver, and gateway to information is slowly diminishing. Concurrent with this trend is the rise of potential opportunities for new roles. The new roles that we hear most about, perhaps, are instruction in information literacy/fluency and the management of digital assets.

Within the digital assets area, I think that the development of thematic digital projects is a particularly fertile area. When faculty approach teaching, their own research or a collaborative research project, they now have opportunities to do sophisticated things with information resources. Some examples include:

• a ceramics professor uses his connection with hundreds of artists around the world to create digital collection of ceramic art images (accessCeramics)
  
• an environmental studies program uses social bookmarking software to develop a virtual library of research resources on environmental issues at various geographic sites (L&C Environmental Studies)
  
• using an online digital collection, students observe the process of writing a poem by viewing its evolution from an initial draft through various stages of revision and eventual publication (William Stafford Archive)
  
• students do primary historical research on a topic and contribute their work to a publicly available online collection of historical research (History Engine)
  
• a biology professor studying hundreds of different spider species wants displays her findings geographically on Google Earth and Google Maps

I think academic libraries should develop the expertise and capacity to support these kinds of thematic projects. This is relatively new territory for libraries. We are more comfortable managing our own internal catalogs and collections and providing standardized services. The institutional repository is really not much of a leap for us: it's an attempt to go out and uniformly collect and catalog objects. Many digital collections don't go much further than digitize and catalog a defined set of photographs, manuscripts, etc. held in the library.

But I think there are more interesting opportunities when we actually wade out into the messy world of teaching and research and offer up our expertise at organizing information. A way of doing this is to establish some kind of a digital initiatives program that faculty can engage with directly. We see this at large institutions such as University of Virginia and Columbia, but also now increasingly at liberal arts colleges like Hamilton, The University of Richmond, and Kenyon. The programs at these institutions in one way or another offer support to faculty for teaching or research related digital projects.

At Lewis & Clark, it is my goal to develop a digital initiatives program from the library that provides support for academic projects that involve sophisticated information management problems. Our library has been ramping up support for digital initiatives for the last seven years or so. We began with initiatives to digitize student theses and put some of our archival collections online. We also developed a digital image collection to support arts and humanities instruction. As a side project a few years ago we started working with an studio art professor to develop a collection of images of contemporary ceramics: accessCeramics. The project has involved all sorts of interesting technical and organizational challenges. Above all, it has been a a truly collaborative effort between several library staff and the faculty.

The success of this project made me want to expand the library's digital initiatives to include more collaborative academic projects. However, I wasn't really sure if demand existed for these kinds of projects. To find out, I made an effort this spring to speak with at least one faculty member in each department at Lewis & Clark about potential digital collaborations with the library.

After talking to about 15 faculty, I have a good handful of ideas for projects, some more imminent than others. They include: web mapping wine and foi gras regions in Oregon and France for an anthropologist, digitizing, translating, and annotating collection of published documents from an early 20th century Moroccon Jewish community for another anthropologist, creating an online map to accompany a book about Mount Fuji by a historian of modern Japan, developing an online archive of historical depictions of Lewis & Clark's slave York for a communications scholar, building maps and phylogenetic tree of various spider species for a biologist, developing an archiving system for recitals for the Music department.

A few trends emerged in my conversations. Even though I unearthed some real cool ideas for projects, traditional scholarly communication methods still seemed to dominate faculty thinking when discussing their academic work. Digital work in non traditional forms is bonus work in their eyes and those working for tenure are hard pressed to find the time for it. Geocoding and web mapping were popular projects. There is a seemingly insatiable demand for assistance with generic web design, development, and upkeep by faculty for their personal pages and pages related to their research and other academic endeavors like conferences. Among the handful of scientists I spoke with, I had been expecting to find a need for long term preservation and access of scientific data, but I found that most of these researchers had disciplinary level destinations on the internet for the research data that they believed was critical to preserve and disseminate. The scientists' interests were in making their scientific work more accessible to a broader audience via the web rather than than data preservation.

Right now, I'm still in the process of talking to more faculty to get a feel for the types of projects that might be useful for their teaching/research. My goal is to come up with a digital initiatives program that offers certain services based on what faculty want and what we can do. As of now, I'm thinking that our digital initiatives program should prioritize projects that involve a sophisticated information management problem and provide a relatively broad impact, especially among students of our institution.

I'm hoping that we can provide a couple different levels of support: one level would be consulting. We would offer our expertise to jump start someone on an information management project: building a Google map, organizing a wiki or a database, teaching a class about mashups. A second level of support would be project based: we would take responsibility for a finite project: developing part of a website, a database etc. The top level of support would involve making a long term commitment to a digital resource or collection, the kind of commitment we now have to accessCeramics.

The other critical aspect of this initiative is to find the human resources internal to the library to support it. To do so, we need staff with expertise in a few key areas:

• metadata profiling
  
• metadata assignment
• information architecture
• web design
• web programming
• project management
• grant writing
  

In our shop, we have a Digital Services Coordinator at Watzek with voracious appetite for web development and programming who likes nothing better to be given free reign on a challenging, creative project. As our portfolio of projects has grown, however, he is stretched for time. Fortunately, we have a cataloging assistant who is emerging as a talented designer and creative metadata strategist, and due to some increased efficiencies in our tech services operations, we've been able to reallocate some of her position to design and digital project metadata work. Special Collections and Visual Resources do most of the metadata work on digital projects in their areas. I do some web programming but recently, more project management and grant writing.

Nevertheless, to expand further, we'll need to find more time and expertise among our staff in a budget neutral environment. As manager of our cataloging/acquisitions (Collection Management Services) operations, I'm looking hard to find ways that we can save time on things like copy cataloging, serials checkin, and govt. docs. Even if we can free up time, developing the skills among staff in areas needed to support digital projects remains a challenge. Making the switch from traditional cataloging to digital project metadata work isn't a huge leap. But finding staff who can do work like web design and web programming is a bigger shift. As a manager, if there are any signs of that kind of aptitude in existing employees, I'm looking to foster it.

There are some potential pitfalls to a digital initatives program like this. The first one is overloading library staff: we have a lot to do just keeping our own house in order, and my faith in network level services lightening that load may be a bit naive. Many institutions would view this kind of function as more appropriately filled by a unit independent from the library, perhaps in IT or instructional technology. In our case, I want to keep IT in the loop at all stages, make sure that we don't overlap our services, and partner when possible. Another criticism is that the services provided by this program could represent a very uneven distribution of library resources to support the interests of particular faculty. As a library, we're used to providing relatively broad based transactional services like checking out books and answering reference questions that benefit a wide swath of the institution. This is something to be conscious of when designing this type of program. The other side of it is that these projects are often immediately beneficial to current students and faculty whereas many library-centered or institutionally-oriented digitization projects have somewhat diffuse, long term benefits.

I think developing this kind of program has some compelling advantages. These kinds of services can really advance faculty research and teaching and help assure the continued relevance of the library. If we help faculty do the heavy lifting needed to do more advanced projects and get more grants and recognition, they will back the library that much more. Administrators like deans and presidents love to see this kind of innovation as it can truly advance an institution's core mission, and in fact many of the centers I mentioned above have been started in top-down fashion by such officials.

This kind of creative work can help energize a library and connect library staff to the academic mission of the institution. I also think there is a tie in with library liaison work and library instruction. Collaborative work with faculty on collection development, instruction sessions, and information literacy can foster connections that lead to some of these digital projects. I'm hoping that reference/instruction librarians can be partners in this endeavor as well, especially when it comes to recruiting interested faculty.

To put this in perhaps more tangible terms for the code4lib crowd: starting this type of program can lead to more cool projects. I think the code4lib phenomenon is about the library becoming that much more of a creative organization, and starting a digital initiatives program will move it further in that direction.

Digital Initiatives at a Liberal Arts College Library

At work, I've been thinking about new digital services that the library could introduce, potentially in partnership with other units at L&C. Here is the draft of a short paper that I've put together on the topic:

Potential Future Digital Initiatives at Watzek Library

This paper is intended to stimulate thinking and discussion about potential digital initiatives involving a variety of constituents at Lewis & Clark including faculty, the Library, IT, New Media, etc.

As the nature of research, scholarship, and learning changes in an increasingly digital environment, academic libraries need to rethink the services that they are providing. This rethinking is even more crucial in a tight budget environment where we need to maximize the impact of the funds expended on library services and resources.

In the past five years, Watzek Library has developed its capacity to support digital initiatives in three main areas: enhancements to the library website and the functions it provides to support research, the Visual Resources Collection, and Special Collections and Archives. Some of the projects that we have completed include the Special Collections and Archives Digital Collection, the MDID image collection, our senior theses collection, accessCeramics, and the William Stafford Archives. Work on these projects has allowed us to develop expertise in information architecture, design, web programming, metadata management, Web 2.0 technologies, and digital scholarship.

As we look towards the future, we would like to broaden the impact of Watzek's digital initiatives and make more connections with academic endeavors across the College. These are a list of possible digital services that the library could offer in the future. In one form or another, they are being offered by colleges and universities around the United States. We are putting this list forward to gauge interest and applicability at Lewis & Clark.

Thematic Digital Collections: Faculty may have interest in developing an online archive of primary materials, scholarship, or data associated with their scholarship and/or teaching. The Library might partner with faculty on the development of online collections of images, documents, or other media surrounding a particular topic. We could provide the expertise in digitization, software selection, database design, metadata schemas, information architecture and search engine optimization needed to develop such projects. Our collaboration might take the form of a consultation or a more extensive partnership for larger collections that would fit in with Watzek Library's long term digital collections. One example of such a project is accessCeramics, a database of contemporary ceramics images developed as a partnership between Assistant Professor of Ceramics Ted Vogel and Watzek Library. accessCeramics has paired Vogel's connections to the ceramics community and interest in curating an online collection of images with Watzek Library's expertise in digital collections. A few other examples of thematic archives arranged around faculty research interests include the Gerald Warner Taiwan image collection, a project of Associate Professor Paul D. Barclay and Digital Inititives Librarian Eric Luhrs at Layfayette College, the Anarchy Archives, a project of Professor David Ward at Pitzer College, and the Murals of Northern Ireland collection a project of Tony Crowley, the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College and one of numerous thematic collections in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

Institutional Repository: The library could support an online digital archive devoted to storing and making accessible digital objects associated with the academic life of the College. The content might include faculty and student scholarship, materials from College symposia, and other media. The library already archives student theses, as do some individual departments. For an example of an institutional repository at a liberal arts college, see Macalester's Digital Commons.

Platforms for Collaborative Student Research: In the digital environment, there are growing opportunities for students to work together on research projects. Using social bookmarking software and wikis, students can share resources with each other. Lewis & Clark's Environmental Studies program uses delicious.com to accumulate and organize research resources around particular sites. Software like the History Engine gives students a platform for the publishing of original research using primary sources. The library could serve as a consultant with faculty in the deployment and use of these resources. The library could also act as an agent to preserve the output of these collaborations over time.

Data Curation: Lewis & Clark has several active research laboratories in the sciences and social sciences. The library could serve as a consultant in the organization and long term storage and preservation of data output as a result of this research, whether in local or remote repositories. The library could recommend remote digital archives, storage technologies, metadata schemas, and information architectures that suit the needs of a particular research lab. To our knowledge, this is a relatively new area for liberal arts colleges and we do not have successful examples of this type of service.

Expanding Visual Resources: Our Visual Resources Collection currently supports teaching with images of art and culture through a local collection of images (MDID) as well as licensed collections of images such as ARTstor. These images are used primarily by Art and Art History faculty, but are also used by faculty in other humanities disciplines as well as the social sciences. Should we expand our support for images to include scientific images and the scientific disciplines? Currently, our expertise in images is limited largely to still images and 2d images. Should we develop expertise in acquisition and delivery of moving images as well as three dimensional image technology?

Web Archiving: Content on the web represents a range of activities across Lewis & Clark, both academic and non-academic. Meeting minutes, departmental rosters, symposia programs, syllabi, campus news, etc. all live on the web. But much of this content is ephemeral: it is taken down and disappears after it no longer has currency. Should the library take responsibility for archiving all or part of Lewis & Clark's web output for the needs of future generations? Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore have a web archiving initiative underway using the Achive-It software from the Internet Archive.

Services to Support Scholarly Communication in the Digital Environment: The library could develop a menu of services to support faculty as they publish their research. These services could include: consulting/education on copyright and open access, assistance with acquiring rights for digital assets (such as images) for use in publication, advice on publishing research data, assistance with scholarly reputation management on the web. Oberlin College's Library has an initiative focused on transforming scholarly communication, which includes advising faculty on copyright and open access opportunities.

Mark Dahl
Associate Director for Digital Initiatives and Collection Management
Watzek Library
Lewis & Clark College

the rise of the verticals

Mike Shatzkin, a commentator on the book publishing industry, makes the following observation:

Horizontal aggregation was more efficient in a world of physical delivery. Vertical aggregation makes more sense in a world of digital delivery. And enabling the customer or user to have some control over the curation is possible in the digital world but hardly is in the physical.

Shatzkin sees the future information ecosystem trending towards niches or 'verticals' with global audiences.

He is contrasting this model with traditional bookstores and trade publishers that cover a wide range of subjects. It also seems the opposite of the way that a traditional academic or public library is setup with books spanning a wide range of subjects and positioned to serve a local audience.

old=local and horizontal
new=global and vertical

I would argue that in the academic repository arena, we can already observe the difference between these two approaches.

Institutional repositories aggregate scholarship that crosses a wide range of subject areas only tied together by affiliation with a single academic institution. They might be described as local and horizontal.

Disciplinary repositories like the Social Science Research Network and arxiv.org concentrate content in certain academic disciplines. They might be described and global and vertical.

Which model is more successful, the disciplinary repositories or the institutional ones? If this ranking is right, it is the disciplinary repositories. They have the most momentum and interest behind them.

Generally, I think that digital initiatives in libraries will be most successful if they are able to build on a vertical community. Projects that are too wide in scope end up being about nothing.

funding models for digital projects

Thanks to Liberal Education Today for the reference to an Ithaka report called "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today." We've been having discussions on how to sustain our comparatively tiny accessCeramics digital project and came up with a similar list of options offered in this report, including: subscription, licensing to publishers and users, custom services, corporate sponsorship, author fees, endowment, and grants. Not surprisingly, it doesn't have any easy answer regarding which one is best.

The report is very critical about relying too much on what can be the invisible support of parent institutions.

To some extent, I think one just has to accept that these kind of projects can be somewhat transitory in nature. The report appears to be reaching for some kind of formula for permanent sustainability. But, indeed, if a project has a viable life for a decade and then its content migrates along to a new home, all is well.

The Symposium on Teaching with Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts in May at Reed College had a few cases of small scale digital projects at liberal arts colleges. In most cases, they revolved around supporting a research and teaching interest of a particular faculty member. The product would be used in instruction at a local institution, but at the same time had a global reach. Lafayette College's image collection of Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, co curated by a historian at the school and the library's special collections unit was one example. Claremont had several others. In these kinds of cases the institution is really supporting the work as part of faculty teaching and research and the library is acting as a kind of institutionally-sponsored laboratory.

I wonder if there are system-wide solutions that could make it easier for small scale digital projects to create revenue streams. Should digital collections software like ContentDM make it possible to sell high quality images, for example? Should it facilitate donations or sponsorship of collections?

OCLC now offers the ability to post local digital collections into WorldCat. But what if a library wants to license out some of its digitized content? A player like OCLC could develop pools of topically oriented, "premium" digital content from member libraries and charge for it. I have to believe that libraries will strive to keep their digital projects open and free.

The reality is that we get a lot of information on the open web for free now. But what incentive is there to pay that back by contributing something ourselves?

NITLE workshop on Scholarly Collaboration

I attended a good workshop put on by NITLE about two weeks ago in sunny Claremont, CA at Pomona College. No good excuse for not posting this earlier.

A few particularly interesting things that I've picked up at this workshop:

• got a look at CommentPress, mentioned in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
  
• a recent white paper on fair use, published by ARL, suggesting that academics should take a more aggressive stance on what's eligible for fair use protection; could have some implications for some digitization projects.
  
• Homer Multitext project: an effort sponsored by the Center for Hellenic Studies to present multiple historical manuscripts of the Illiad and the Odyssey alongside each other. Faculty and students at liberal arts college have been heavily involved in the project. The fellow presenting on it made the case that this style of digitization was could be contrasted with the Google Books project: careful, thoughtful, interpretive, scholarly rather than scanning by the dump-truck load.
  
• Anarchist Archives: a good example of a thematic digital archive sponsored by a faculty member; the model of a faculty member curating a digital collection is an interesting one; I can see some possibilities for it at Lewis & Clark