Sustainability I: The Projects

Presentations

Notes - Sustainability I: The Projects

• Martin Halbert (Emory, new project, PI): rich set of services and content to NSDL and library community, p2p network; doing sustainability research
• Philip Lee (University of Texas, Galveston, CephBase): committed to design front-end for secondary education; want to sustain that
• Wendy Parfrey (CDL, new project): sustainability of digital collections higher ed and k12; very difficult in mid school arena to generate revenue because they dont have money; UC interest: when state funding is cut, where do you look next and how do you sustain with what you have; California has 25% cut; very interest in commercial models
• Russ Hummel (new project): thinks sustainbiliy is key
• Janet Smith (ENC): sust. For ENC is important; they have 25k resource collection and 6 other collections, most have a 2 yr funding cycle; how to sustain collections in terms of staff and financial
• Fran L? (Hawaii Pacific, Ethno-mathematics): just finished their funding; asked for 1 year extension; want to know what other projects are doing
• Ellen Cabot (Eastern Iowa CC; create environmental resrouce library; 2nd year); have history of getting grants; interested in going after hard $
• Jack (American Inst. Of Physics): 6 elements of sust. Model, mainly association based: institutional subs., user subs., how to embed diglib as a service and pay for it like other electronic services
• Stu ? (just ended project): where to get $; set up peer review systems for quality additional to content; need help from NSDL to convince scientific community that his peer review is as significant as other
• Susan Musante (ASM): just ended funding and are looking to subscriptions
• Ron Vetter (iLumina, UNCW): sust. Plans are to put iLumina resources in university library to sustain
• Mariano Valdez (University of Missouri, Rolla): have built the library, what to do with it now? Give to an association or go commercial?
• Janice L. (PM for GROW, University of Arizona): with Muni Budhu

• Project has several areas of expertise contributing; also have multiple corporate partners
• Sustainability Plan:
• Delivery of tech infrastructure; the University has offered to maintain technology
• Biggest focus is to maintain services and grow collections
• Was surprised that hed have to sustain project; was used to traditional grant funding cycle
• Collaborated with business school grad to create a business plan
• Divided market into academic (end users) and business community; convinced that academic will not generate revenue; business: how do we convince people to give money to a project that other people use; finding it difficult to convince societies, found a hook to develop continuing education to societies; are working with publishers to have people buy books through their site and they get a percentage of the sale; created a foundation for businesses to put money into project
• Short-term market objectes: develop customer base (how are they tracking their users?); create an awareness; recognized they didnt have experience in marketing
• Long term objectives
• Is it difficult to expand your marketing plans; marketing for two audiences could be difficult
• Challenges: people/funders have to recognize the value; a logo doesnt always indicate value
• Must have a business plan; Sustainability is difficult and time consuming; difficult to get people to give money
• Expected CI to provide infrastructure while they grew the collection; created much of their content
• Has a business plan

• Much of first two years was spent on building infrastructure
• Early on established relationships with professional societies (ACM); got early on the metadata for ACM digital library; had invitations from ACM to explore closer collaboration
• Look at organization mission and how does it relate to the mission of the collection? Must align before going forward; recognize that the infrastructure in plan can be built on by project
• Support components of ACM: solicit materials and provide reviews and maintain resources; CITIDEL does provide some non-reviewed materials
• ACM could provide a model, recognized that paper is going away, looked early on at how to sustain online presence of paper projects
• CITIDEL directly addresses the ACM Education Boards needs
• Tapping in to a funding source: SIGSCE
• Questions to be resolved: whats the position of CITIDEL within ACM regarding continuing development of CITIDEL; theyre not ready to be integrated yet: enhance interface and content; ACM will not fund next stage development, will maintain servers, possibly treated like other ACM publications (support for editor and assistant); want support for another stage of development before steady-state delivery.
• This makes sense for CITIDEL because theyre aligning closely to ACM
• Q: Subscriptions to non-members to generate enough revenue to sell educational products
• A: The educational mission doesnt bring in money; if the role is relevant to the organizations mission; whats the value of the activity

• Editing isnt as highly valued today
• JCE has an open area and a for-fee area; want to strike a balance between the two
• Recognize that the resource intensive activities must be supported
• Questions whether theyre skilled enough in marketing
• Sustaining evaluation: reduce barriers, provide rewards, invite participation, predicate use on feedback, requires staffing (another cost); community review hasnt worked well
• Sustaining editing: link closely the their value-add activities to cost/fee; volunteer editors (for features)
• Sustaining use: establish and maintain resources, provide added value, find niche, know your audience
• Sustaining archive: partner bc they dont have capability to keep up with standards and architecture
• JCE Sustainability plans: Institutionalize, partner, library subscription, free vs. paid balance, marketing is key to
• Q: Advertising? Have you attracted new ones
• A: They have an ad agency. They do sell in print and online, it pays for printing; 25-30% is printing and distribution, the rest is staff time covered by subscriptions; in his market, the web only adds are not attractive
• Q: considering morphing into a digital journal; comment on it
• A: recognize that turning projects into ejournals also needs to meet needs of academic tenure; capitalize on the added value (other than print) that digital environment will provide

• Focus is connecting with user groups to sustain funding, AVCs is primarily Department of Energy
• Recognized the need of DOE to disseminate the multitude of data they collect to end users; also DOE has educational programs which link into the NSDL mission
• Q: did you also use most of your NSDL funding on technical infrastructure
• A: yes; also gathering usage statistics, but not many; found that their users (middle school teachers) were not what they originally anticipated (grad and researchers)

• Scientists should be involved building process; leverage the scientist enterprise who need to get their data to the public
• Converting materials to educational uses is expensive
• People are interested in other possible funding agencies
• One barrier is that the generating agency owns the scientific data and usually the database to access it
• Another model: serving continuing education needs of businesses [this is an end-user community]
• Another user community with potential money: teachers writing grants

• Projects spent their initial funding building infrastructure because the CI didnt have one for them; over 50% of time and money was devoted to that
• Projects must prove the value of their content, service, product to a potential funding source
• Projects missions must have a mission aligned with a potential funding source
• Possible funding routes: GROW: commercial; CITIDEL: associations
• Institutions are often willing to provide technical support

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