Printing Sustainability II: NSDL


Sustainability II: NSDL



Dave McArthur, Consultant

Ed Fox, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Reagan Moore, San Diego Supercomputer Center

Dave McArthur, North Carolina Central University


The panel will include presentations on technical as well as business models for the NSDL, drawing lessons from existing large-scale successful digital enterprises and attempting to apply them to the NSDL. These relatively tactical talks will be complemented by more strategic ones that attempt to define what the NSDL is or will be (e.g., primarily a collection or collections vs. a tightly integrated set of collections complemented by many value-added community services?), and how these options relate to the models presented in the breakout. This will provide a background for the roundtable discussions which follow.

Presentations


Here are the ppts for the breakout presentations:

Dave McArthur - Sustainability II introductory remarks

Reagan Moore � Technical issues in sustainability of NSDL

Ed Fox � Lessons for NSDL sustainability from CITIDEL

Dave McArthur - Sustainability and business options for the NSDL


Notes - Sustainability II: NSDL


Places to look for appropriate funding are different than project sustainability.

Introductions of participants


What will NSDL look like 5 to 10 years from now?
How do individual projects see their connection in a whole in relationship to suistainability? That is does or doesn't survive in 5 to 10 years how will that impact your project? Morning session focused on individual projects sustainability and less on sustainabiliy as a whole. What does it mean to sustain the NSDL, what components?
2 issues

1. How to assemble collection to suistan for a long time after the technology used to build long dissappeared.



2. Who should be the long term custodian? What's the appropriate form for archiving?

Working with academic institutions on collections important to their interest.

URL is being registered in the NSDL. The metadata is self describing.
Assert authenticity, that it has not been modified

Technology must be able to adapt to allow collection material to persist.

data grid technology is being used to crawl to some depth within a collection. Maintains administrative metadata.

Desire to develop a preserved version of the site that one can click through. 2.5% failure on grabbing pages.

Wide variety of digital entities in these collections. 223 mime types for federal web sites.

Question on Flash mime type missing. Redoing another crawl to a level 10 to gain more detailed list of mime types.

Wishes to convert every digital entity.

Technical questions

NSDL archive or archive of your material that can be interacted with.
Where does the material go?
Is the NSDL archive of web crawls appropriate for achival?
Does your project need this at all?

Long term host for collection. Where does your material go at the end of the project?

Will you eventually crawl all the NSDL Collections. All that allow us to crawl are crawled.

There are many people preserving web sites differentiated by what they do with the content. Too many digital entities, so containers are needed. Containers are pushed to archives. Assume they are writting the data to local disk. Focuses on bulk management.

Bruster crawls a subset not all digital entities. Has a terrabyte of crawls.

At risks formats like MS Office is conversion attempted? MS provides tools for conversion, which is the desire in the long run. The question is if this is worthwhile.

The tools ms provides produce a strange XML. We use multiple conversion tools to move this XML to standard XML.


Ed Fox

Connections between projects and the NSDL as a whole. There's a natural coupling between these. If we really are building a STEM library then material needs to be there. There are fundamental items in the NSDL that without a sequal we would be in defeat... wasted a lot of money.

The grouping together of the projects should be maintained.

There are fundamental things that need to be maintained through for profit or other models.

History of computing in digital libraries Fox began in 1991. NSF wanted a project on computing content working with a publisher. Followup funding was through infrastructure project 95-97? So the question there was what is useful for the publisher. Knowledge was the useful item, lesson plans. The projects have gone through evolution...

Focus on content and services.

Electronic thesis / dissertations 1987

precursor to webct and blackboard.

grey literature

project on curriculum in multimedia

Part of iLumina project mixing computing and chem with other fields.

Run until next summer with 4 partners in CITIDEL project

Can do services for community which are being folded into OCKHAM.

Content then services will be looked at.

Stimulate production of educational material. In the computing field this sharing is rare. Improve the quality and organize those contributing... Rewarding / Publishing is part of this process. Move to an electronic journal, so that people contributing gain something for their CV. We could have an NSDL Journal Series.

We have publisher that only cover part of the field. Even the biggest publishers don't cover all topics in a field. So what happens to publishing competitors if we collaborate with only one?

One stop shopping for core intergration. For ACM Pubs is interested in working on JERIC and acm dl. Many publishers are starting to think they need to work in this area.

Community building part of having content come from community shoudl be managed and sustained by their community. We need universities to maintain some of these things.

Amy R. and VIADUCT allows combining of small components into larger educational objects. Work on multilingual translations. Tools for collecting, classifying,... These need to be put into a DL toolkit. OCKHAM will adopt some of these.

Issues and tradeoffs.

Does the project suistain itself or NSDL suistain the projects.

We need to sustain some of the project. There needs to be continuity. Partners? What do you do when you need to have multiple partners? Publishers help with content and gray literature, but not much with web content. Community building associations can help with.


Next talk... Fesability Studies for the NSDL Business Options

A model for sustainability for large scale projects yolks to small scal projects

This came up in contects with the suistainability committee. Workshops and documents have been produced directly at NSDL as a whole.

In a couple of years NSDL as a project will need to be reapproved to continue being NSF funding. What is NSDL going to do? It needs a business plan for the long term. It is conceivable that the same status can be confered on NSDL as ?

Part of the problem of migrating to other business entity is what the entity would be. There is a lot of effort to develop ejournals. They are unsure if there is enough revinue to sustain these efforts. They are debating these things and know what they want to do.

Some of the example we heard today may become the options used.

Looking at several business models for the NSDL. Building on the original model, and 2-3 papers laying out suggestions for business models.

Workshop will layout some of these models. Developing a companion paper on these models. A market scan on business models possible. Looking for feedback now on some of these models.

Proposal for workshop is available. Please comment on it.

High level examination of feasibility of models. Suggests book on "What management is".

What products or services are being proposed to be created. What is the value of this procuct / services? Who will pay for it? The primary customers will not directly pay for this.

What does NSDL bring to the table that others do not? How will the NSDL do this business approach? Where will NSDL find partners, or does it need partners for this approach?

There was a lot of discussions this morning about partnerships for collections.

What do you get if you have a successful NSDL? What are the higher level benefits? Will NSDL be a good things because users have better rights acces?

What are the sorts of options that we look at for business models? There are more areas where the NSDL may target. Value added service provider for specific sectors is the target suggested by Ben for middle school. Specifically tuned for middle school students, teachers, etc...

Next 2-3 is available to start this business effort. How can we make this float in that time frame? Were are we going to go after the NSF funding goes away. Are we going to charge school subscriptions... they are very poor. Are you going to sell it to school districts? You have to sell to each school district separately which is costly. How about state subscriptions?

Already NSDL is a collection of collections.

Open access no fees for end users... sponsorships, advertising, heavy tax.

Where are the funding components? People in the open access ejournals have some good ideals. This is one option to look at.

Institution subscriptions may be one option. Libraries are used to paying large sums for subscriptions, but they are already at their max. How do we get into this niche? Will they see the NSDL as an alternate to existing journals? We would need to compete with other journals.

NSDL will stay a research facility... Schools will not pay NSDL's R&D.

NSDL will not make a hugh profit margin.

At the very least NSDL needs a revenue stream from NSF or federal funding for R&D work. Centers for Science and Learning is one possibility.

Here are ball park reasonable models... none have been thrown out as out of the ball park. But none are a home run... So we may need to consider combinations.

Turn NSDL prototypes into refined publications for sale as journals.

We want to be sure we have all the players at the workshop. Higher ed, K-12, publishers, small ejournals, professional societies, academic research libraries, institutional repositories (which didn't exist when NSDL started), and other vendors. Hot issues will be publishers are not only overly expensive, but also retain more copywrite than educators would like. NSDL may give more control of copywrite. You must show NSDL material fits their state standards.

Desires feedback on these models. Are there ones we shouldn't be considering? Are there other players we should be talking to? What steps should follow up?

Has much work been done within National Library Medicine? IMLS is well made but others are lacking... Changes in society and needs. Important to have representatives from NLM.

In linguistics a mailing list started that became the way for discussions, it became a website for linguistic research. It is now crucial for the research oranizations. Everything goes through this website for this area of research. They have tried subscriptions which failed... Academics won't pay for subscriptions.

Grass roots efforts do exist mainly from blood sweat and tears of participants. The broader the community gets the less likey grass roots efforts will work.

Linguistics now have funding base that's constant with NSF funding occasionally to get major efforts implemented. You need to produce a service users want.

This may not work for middle school.

There are a lot of issues coming up... The existing markets for existing libraries, publishers of books and libraries are logical places to go, but we need to do a lot more. Internally is the first place to go. We have interest in our own project likely from our organization... We provide a large service for knowledge exchange. Look at publishers at brokers of knowledge. Look at knowledge community segmentations. We need a persistant forum online. We need to pay incentives.

Building DL software models for learning and teaching is foreign to schools. How conservative are schools? Likely the NSDL will soon discover this.

NSDL will need to find clients with need for this material. It would be nice to have these communittees developed, but as business models these are risky. We should have serious discussion on how to sell this as a good thing.

One of the most important things is marketing. People will not knock on your door for interactive learning objects.

There will always be gaps. There are certain areas that need to be covered in the curriculum. It is very difficult to try to add pieces... we may need comprehensive items. But this may be appropriate for constructist educational approach. 95% is drill material in BCS. Taking up forward thinking material is difficult.


DLI other agencies failed to continue promised support. NSDL may want to approach other federal agencies to remove possible issues that were involved with the reasons this occured.

Sustainability also involves the rights of subcollections. Specific licenses often do not exists... The community is getting more sofisticated with information on this beginning to be collected. We need to know ahead of time what rights restrictions are related to different business models.

There is a sustainability standing committee tomorrow at 2:30. Birds of Featheer sustainability at 5:00.

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