Change & Opportunities in a Digital World

1. Change & Opportunitiesin a Digital World Roy Tennant California Digital Library escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/presentations/2002mlnc/

2. Disclaimer • I’m going to be all over the map — from the conceptual to the nitty-gritty • Do not blame the conference organizers • I must leave here knowing that you’ve had at least one opportunity to consider these issues

3. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” — A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

4. Let’s Travel Back in Time… • 15 years ago (1987) - early glimmers of the Internet • HyperCard, an early hypertext system • 10 years ago, a watershed event: Gopher • Shortly thereafter, another watershed event: the Web and Mosaic[the power of a common protocol and encoding standard] • This revolutionary change has had a far-reaching impact on libraries…

5. Reference Usage is in Decline Ratio of Reference Queries to Professional Staff Source: ARL Statistics

6. Circulation is in Decline • 51% of the respondents to a Library Journal survey* cited a circulation decline • Of those respondents, 95% blamed the Internet * Annual book-buying survey, as reported in the Feb. 15, 2000 issue

7. The Pivotal Opportunity • But with this change and challenge comes a tremendous opportunity: • To create a new relationship with our users • To expand the reach of our collections around the world • To create services that are not bound to time and place • To redefine the word “library”

8. Creating and Managing Digital Collections • Be careful what you wish for, because you will never go back • It is tremendously rewarding… • …and a heck of a lot of work! • You will learn things they didn’t teach you in library school • And apply some of what you learned in new ways

9. A Story From the Field

10. Digitization Synergies • Standards and best practices • Virtual collections • Synergistic services

11. Virtual Collections

12. Synergistic Services

13. How Will You? • Capture • Describe • Serve • Preserve

14. Capture • The highest resolution and bit depth you can possibly afford • Consider outsourcing • Be clear about your rendering intent

15. Rendering Intent:Content v. Artifact • What is your “rendering intent”? • To present the item as it is now (perhaps decayed) • To present the item as it may have been when it was created (or at least in a more usable form) • Why not both?

17. Planning for Change • The natural state of the universe is change • Dealing with change well requires planning for it • How should digitization projects plan for change? • By focusing on key considerations such as formats and description

18. Formats • Ubiquitous (widely used) • Open (published standard; e.g., TIFF) • Standardized structure (for text)

19. Description • Commonly referred to as metadata • Collect as much as you can • Store it in a machine-parseable form • As granular as future purposes may require • And qualified when appropriate

20. Metadata: Granularity • <name>William Randolph Hearst</name> • <name> <first>William</first> <middle>Randolph</middle> <last>Hearst</last></name> • Consider all uses for the metadata • Design for the most granular use (slice and dice as small as you can stand) • Store it in a machine-parseable format

21. Metadata: Machine Parseability • The ability to pull apart and reconstruct metadata via software • For example, this:<name> <first>William</first> <middle>Randolph</middle> <last>Hearst</last></name> • Can easily become:<DC.creator>Hearst, William Randolph</DC.creator>

22. Metadata: Qualification • <name role=“creator”>William Randolph Hearst</name> • <subject scheme=“LCSH”>Builder -- Castles -- Southern California</subject>

23. Metadata: Organization • The schema or software you use to store it doesn’t matter • What does matter is that you: • Capture the quantity required for your purposes • Capture it at the granularity required for your purposes • Use appropriate vocabularies, if any • Qualify the metadata where required • Store it in a machine-parseable format • Can output it in any format required for interoperability with those important to you

24. Serve • Collection- vs. Item-Level Access • User Malleable Interfaces • Interoperability

25. Collection- vs. Item-Level Access • Collection-level access: • Discovery metadata describes the collection • Example: Archival finding aid encoded in SGML; see http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ • Item-level access: • Discovery metadata describes the item • Example: MARC or Dublin Core records for each item; see http://jarda.cdlib.org/search.html • Both types of access may be appropriate (“more is better”) • Doing both often takes very little extra effort

26. Collection Level Access Images Individual Finding Aid Search & Browse Interface Individual Finding Aid

27. Item Level Access Finding Aids Images Individual Finding Aid Search & Browse Interface Individual Finding Aid Individual Finding Aid

28. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/

33. jarda.cdlib.org/search.html

34. Combined Access Main Entry Point Images Individual Finding Aid Search & Browse Interface Search & Browse Interface Individual Finding Aid

35. User-Malleable Interfaces • The ability of a user to make changes to what they see for their own purposes • It’s often easier than you think to provide these capabilities

41. Interoperability • The ability of two or more disparate and distant collections to act as one • Standards are required • Two standards to watch: • Metadata Encoding and Transfer Syntax (METS) • Open Archives Initiative

42. Preserve • There are no digital preservation formats, only a commitment and a migration strategy • To be ready for migration: • Follow best practices in capture • Store your objects in standard formats • Describe them well in a machine-parseable storage format

43. Why We Digitize • Our users often go to the Internet rather than to us • By putting useful, interesting content and services on the Web we can win them back • When Yahoo! And Amazon are no more, we will still be here… • …with rich collections and services carefully and methodically created over years… • …to serve their needs as we have for centuries