Printing Digital Libraries and the Intellectual and Economic Universe

Digital Libraries and the Intellectual and Economic Universe

Eileen Dolan, Wiley InterScience

Michael Lesk, Rutgers � The State University of New Jersey

Joyce Ray, Institute of Museum and Library Services

Moderator Dave McArthur, NSDL Sustainability Committee

Presentations

Dave McArthur -- Introduction

Eileen Dolan -- Sustaining Digital Libraries, A Publisher�s Perspective

Michael Lesk -- Paying for Digital Libraries

Joyce Ray -- Cultural Heritage Online

Notes - Digital Libraries and the Intellectual and Economic Universe

Eileen Dolan - Sustaining Digital Libraries, A Publisher�s Perspective

Perspective of NSDL - broad, covering everything in the information cycle

Do you have what you need?

You can't be all things to all people

Research Cycle - it's good to look at everything, but a sustainable model needs to be scaled down

Information Cycle is pretty broad from authoring to storage

publishers can't be experts in every one of these
they work with commercial entities
technology entities are always contacting publishers to get business
publishers worry about metadata, usability, technology...
no publisher will have the one solution, because there isn't one solution

What I saw in NSDL poster session are the things I worry about too

they built interfaces, digitized collections, business models, licensing agreements
everyone here is probably thinking about customizing their own portals for their audience and data - that's a lot of different interfaces

People start in many areas to find information - your portal or Google

Licensing Deals - robust, scalable - but publishers can't build everything themselves

Consultancy - workgroups at university or commercial level help them think through issues - back end, interoperability, discoverability, search engines - giving advice to help them move forward - long or short term

Partnering - tighter integration - certain objective and they work together to get there - share costs

Good partnering is a learned skill - difficult to sustain - need to understand objectives of all parties

Hot Topics - where focus is centered

input from users
users want a customized experience
it's not what you know about the book, but what you find in the book
challenge to find new ways to integrate access to the content

Things that Greg Crane mentioned are items that publishers are just now getting into

how do they get structure in cost-effective way
there is no one path into information - balance is how much structure up front and how much technology at point of access

collaborations that have worked

Microsoft, Google, Amazon are successes

1 access to Wiley InterScience is Google - it's simply where people start - that's not a custom experience, it's generic and simple

they look to "us"? for standards

noise around usage stats and analysis

few places to get good, validated research

opportunity to provide info on usage to commercial entities

it's about access to information

who you think you're reaching is not always who you are reaching

Question from Dave - When you saw NSDL posters, did any connections come to mind?

was interested in usability things and visualization
some research on extraction and creation of metadata on fly, and ways of automating that
infrastructure database integration

people go for pdf's

metadata, interface, and interoperability of structured content are big topics with Eileen

Question from Audience - Do you have anything to share with NSDL for free?

haven't thought how people will be trolling through their content - technical limitations if too many spiders came at once

Michael Lesk - Paying for Digital Libraries

I don't see a quick, easy way to afford what is the grand plan, so we need to think about what we can do that we CAN afford.

it is hard because of the costs of transitions - libraries are typically funded by a typical community - when very few users of your DL are in that community, univ president says, why exactly are we paying for this - so they do minimum possible and say that students will find info somewhere else

In a world of chains, why do we have independently owned libraries?

Digitization is taking over - LoC sent out far more from website than reading room

We can now afford to store vast amounts of stuff online

?? also grows on log scale

There is lots of stuff out there - is it what we want? how do we pay for it?

typically communities pay - universities, public libraries, towns
charge reader a subscription or per item fee
authors pay - vanity press
many purchases are now electronic
Hamad - information should just be free

The cost of a library is not about shelf space (if it was, microfilm would have won).

large savings in storage area - for disk rather than book

front-end work represents most of money - we need a way to do that better

typical user is not in community paying

online subscriptions are increasing but Lesk doesn't think that WSJ can sustain at their current rate

can't compete with free - but some industries have

PLOS - public library of science

trying to match prestige as best paper journal
charge authors per article, then post free
proportionally more scholars are in university - proportionally more readers are in industry

look not at how ???, but look at how can we do it online for free

online advertising is not likely to bail us out
micropayments - pay per view
people prefer to pay in bulk rather than to save money for ppv

pressure in direction of ??people sitting at desks doing more work

foundations have been supportive of online libraries and ed. but you can't shift burden to them
cost avoidance - fewer people call help line - librarians don't want to limit calls to reference desk
bounties - died out

2 things that seem to work - library subscriptions, author-page charges (paid by institutions)

we're not finding a new way to pay for it

?? doesn't want to cede control of who runs univ lib

information budget

what of underlying technology and metadata is actually doing students some good?

Question - What about a hybrid business model - meter end user access to lesser used resources & bulk pay for more used resources?

cost for least used would become so high that they could never be afforded
people would use free resources

Question - Why not univ who have good resources try to share them?

MIT is trying with eSpace, this group needs a clearer position on ethics of what to do with material you find
british project - develop cd-roms of teaching material - each faculty member found it unacceptable to give transparencies that someone else wrote but acceptable to use textbook someone else wrote - is CD a textbook or transparencies
need culture where it's okay to re-use material like this and they are able to adapt to suit needs

Comment - We have technologies that make it so that almost anyone can access anything but we have pricing schemes that make it so that almost no one can. We have to reconcile these.

Joyce Ray - Cultural Heritage Online

IMLS

a federal funding agency
mission to enhance museum and library services nationwide
only agency with statutory authority to fund digitization
90% of funding distributed to states who decide where it goes from there - national leadership grants

Colorado Digitization Project

funding since 1999
they work with 40 different institutions in CO

Forum

articulated a set of principles about good digital collections
NISO will maintain this document

but we still have problem of individual collections and bridging content

too much content, no way to integrate it
OAI provided potential for integrating collections
identify elements for collection-level description as well as search registry

knowledge integration - particularly across museums and libraries' content

integrate

museum-goers want an authentic experience but library users want information
same people, just different phases of their needs

??? is an event-centric model - authors and artists at the same time

metadata extraction is an important area as well

what are the principles of a good digital library?

not just a digital collection
defined audience & authority
support, sponsorship of good reliable institution
technology is important but also are the governance issues

transform LIS - support schools of Library Science

IMLS web site

Panel Questions

Question - Is it possible to have hybrid model to provide access ..

Lesk - ?? haven't seen it work - seen a lot of libraries do gateways but haven't seen - would like to believe possible, but can't point to working instance

McArthur - we tend to gravitate to value-added services - believe that it is critical to making content valuable

Dolan - need to address that value-added services are expected

Question - What do we need to do in content direction to move toward more rational model of copyright? We probably don't need to fully protect ??? institution repository? What does community like this do to try to move to find compromises with publishers so that they have viable business models but over time can make content available?

Dolan - discussions are happening, but happending one on one, recording industry for example

a lot of overlap
having discussions of local copy for your institution - but one on one - landscape is shifting somewhat
on one hand - we have fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, but need to think about what does this do 1-5 years down the road
likely to pilot ideas rather than make a broad shift

Question - You said publishers are risk averse but you can't tell us what you view as publishers IP and what is others' IP? Is it loss of ??? or loss of IP for future?

Dolan - both risky - long-term, IP plays key component - cornerstone of business models and distriubtion models, not a single-faceted concept for publisherspublisher community feels strongly about IP and protecting IP - it's about tweaking and thinking through

publishers don't do everything for revenue

today - people have more access to information - that's b/c we went digital

our expectations have changed - we want it (information) now, no waiting - it's not so much is information available anymore but how long do i have to wait to get it

McArthur - barriers

Question - Most discussions are in the context of university - but share how things are different if talking about K-12?

Ray - teachers & students will use content, but they say you cannot underestimate the lack of knowledge teachers have about lack of technology, lack of access to quality equipment, and lack of access to funding to get it

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