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RLG Cultural Materials Alliance and Beyond. Ricky Erway OCLC Programs and Research Meeting of the Cultural Materials Alliance Jan 21, 2007. Evolution of the service. Began planning in 1999 RLG members, board, and staff Technology advisors Formed Alliance in 2000 Advisory groups Policy
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RLG Cultural Materials Alliance and Beyond Ricky Erway OCLC Programs and Research Meeting of the Cultural Materials Alliance Jan 21, 2007
Evolution of the service • Began planning in 1999 • RLG members, board, and staff • Technology advisors • Formed Alliance in 2000 • Advisory groups • Policy • Content • Description • Surrogates • Interface • Instructional technology • Primary, Content, and Technical Contacts at Alliance institutions • CM-forum • Various Alliance meetings • Released RLG Cultural Materials service in 2002
Trove.net • Initial intention, after serving the academic community: • Reach new audiences • Gain experience in licensing use of images • Investigate new revenue potential • Planning with policy advisory group in 2002 • Launched Trove.net in 2004 • Partnership with IndexStock Imagery • Partnership with LookSmart in 2004 • Engaged consultants for various investigations of other opportunities
Summary to Date • 54 Alliance institutions • 36 contributors • 117 collections • 250,000 works • ¾ million digital objects • About 50 institutions subscribed
Accomplishments • An international Alliance • Agreements for collaboration • Acceptable terms of use • Descriptive Metadata Guidelines • Preparing Digital Surrogates Guidelines • Report on the use of images in the classroom • Innovative interface for enhanced discovery of cultural documents • Public/private collaboration on image licensing • Greater exposure of members’ special collections via the open web • Collaborative experience for participants
Sober Assessment • Digitization motivated primarily by local factors • Not much content that wasn’t already freely available • Modest subscriber base with little prospect for growth – and disappointing use at institutions that did subscribe • Users were looking somewhere else • Partnerships with commercial interests did not bear expected fruit
Decision to end RLG Cultural Materials • High cost to maintain • Low revenue • Maturation of digitization initiatives • New framework for similar activity
What next? • RLG Programs will continue to investigate topics of interest to our partners • Mass digitization • Large-scale digitization of special collections • Registries to coordinate digitization activities • Investigations on the impact of digitized content on scholarly methods • OCLC has an ambitious digital services agenda
Contact info • Ricky Erway • Program officer, RLG Programs • OCLC Programs and Research • (650) 691-2228 • erwayr@oclc.org • Greg Zick • Vice President, Digital Collection Services • OCLC Digital Content Management Services • (206) 281-1632 • zickg@oclc.org