Board of Directors Meetings: Minutes

University of Maryland, College Park, McKeldin Library
Friday, September 26, 2003
9:30 am

Present: Susan Brynteson (U Del); Charles Lowry (UMD); Nancy Gwinn (SIL); Peter Young (NAL); Beacher Wiggins (LC); Jack Siggins (GWU); Ellanu Frierson and Maria Piza (NAL); Mod Mekkawi (HU), President. Also Present: Betty Day, UMD

Absent: Winston Tabb

Meeting was called to order at 9:45 am

1. Minutes of May 29, 2003 were reviewed and approved.

2. IMLS – Board members received a copy of a statement from Artemis Kirk addressing the feedback from IMLS on its grant proposal and the impact of the suggested reductions on the CIRLA Fellows Program. The prospects for both GU and UMD for approval of their respective proposals were discussed. If either or both bids are unsuccessful, we shall try again next year, when IMLS funding is expected to be much larger. The directors believe that IMLS is attempting to spread the available funds across as much as possible.

3. ELSEVIERS – UMD announced that its contract with Elsevier is up for renewal. The University will have access to SD’s Unique Title List. For an additional $7,500, Maryland’s community colleges will obtain full access to this service.

UMD will arrange to delay decision on its contract with Elsevier to consider CIRLA’s interest in a Unique Title List. Betty Day will convene and coordinate a meeting with interested CIRLA libraries. We want to press for the right to cancel titles, to share, and to limit cancellations to commonly held titles and extend this right to Unique Titles.

Susan Brynteson stated that it has cancelled all paper subscriptions There is some concern about archiving considering that Elsevier’s main focus is on the bottom line. Elsevier is discussion archiving with OCLC.

4. Charles Lowry distributed a copy of CIRLA’s financial status as of September 26, 2003, showing a balance of $58,840.00. Susan moved that no dues be collected from CIRLA’s members in FY’04. Motion approved unanimously.

5. Digital Initiatives at UMD – The staff at UMD made two video presentations: (a) DigiTools, an application from ExLibris, which is capable of streaming digital media, supporting various digital formats; and (b) MetaLib./SFX, UMD’s URL resolution and gateway application also from ExLibris, which allows, among other features, a user to search multiple databases simultaneously and provide hotlinks to full text sources from databases licensed by UMD.

Descriptions of these two sessions follow these minutes (text provided by UMD staff— Betty Day and Courtney S. Danforth.

6. Next meeting of the CIRLA Board set for December 12, 2003, at GWU, beginning at 9:00 am.

Meeting adjourned for Lunch, hosted by Charles Lowry.

UMD PRESENTATIONS

UMD Research Port — The UM Libraries (in conjunction with the other USMAI libraries) went live at the beginning of September with a "soft" launch (on campus-only) of Research Port, another Ex Libris product. Last January, the Libraries implemented sfx in available databases linking full-text, the catalog, and other services to specific bibliographic citations.

At this point, all of College Park's licensed electronic databases are linked through Research Port. Even without remote access, users are being encouraged to log in with their name and barcode to take advantage of the customization/personalization features of MetaLib. Each user can set up their own persistent Research Port and save links to favorite databases, e-journals, files of citations, and searches.

Once in Research Port, users can select either databases or e-journals. The ejournal list is created from the sfx database and includes full-text from the aggregator databases so we have an integrated A-Z list of full-text electronic journals.

In the database section, users can choose to select databases by subject category or by name. Another option is the quick search of several high-use general databases such as Academic Search Premier and the catalog. If the option to select by subject category is selected, the user can select up to 8 databases for a multiple database search or can link directly to the native interface of the specific database.

Betty H. Day
E-Content Management & Delivery
Information Technology, University of Maryland

UMD DLI — The University of Maryland Libraries' Digital Library Initiative (DLI) includes two departments: the Media Digitization Unit and the Digital Project Development Unit. The Media Digitization Unit is or soon will be capable of reformatting video (DV and VHS to DV and MPEG), audio (vinyl, cassette, CD to MP3, AIFF, etc), text (to TEI and EAD), image (bound and flat, opaque and transmissive to TIFF, JPEG), and 3D objects (to Quicktime). The Digital Project Development Unit is engaged in project planning, standards, licensing, and grants. Outside of DLI, the Digital Library Advisory Team has representation for subject specialists, special media, rare books and archives, cataloguing, IT, and preservation, and is charged to advise on the growth of our program and prioritization of projects.

Projects currently in some stage of production in DLI include:

• Ephemera from world's fairs and expositions. We have completed reformatting of our own holdings from 1876 (Philadelphia) and 1904 (St. Louis). Approximately 5000 items have yielded approximately 12,000 images.
• Promotional photographs from the WW II era radio program, Vox Pop.
• Audio reserves for the School of Music course, "History of Rock Music."
• Course catalogues. We have completed scanning issues of UM's course catalogues working backwards to 1988. While, perhaps, of limited interest to the world, these materials are in reasonably high demand by our alumni, and provision of online access will relieve a significant time expenditure by the staff of our University Archives.
• Video. We have a license with Films for the Humanities and Sciences to provide online access to digital versions of their videos on campus. We are reformatting most of the titles ourselves.

A gift of video content from the (Jim) Henson Foundation was announced this week. We will be reformatting the video for online delivery.

The delivery technology for UM Digital Collections (get a sneak peak at http://shosai.umd.edu:8881 includes Ex Libris' DigiTool as the digital asset management system, and IBM's VideoCharger for a streaming server. In the next couple of years, we will likely outgrow the IBM product. DigiTool is still very much in development. Large portions of the functionality have been developed at UM; some features may be incorporated into future releases of DigiTool. Our interface to DigiTool is designed to mimic the look and feel of our other Ex Libris products, Aleph and Metalib, in order to facilitate patron use. One of the important differences with DigiTool's functionality is that much of the searching will take place within specific collections (such as the projects listed above), although we also have the capability to search across all collections. One of the more important additional search capabilities we want to develop is to restrict searches to format, both of source object and of digital object. We intend to bring our site live, certainly, by spring semester, and, potentially, much earlier.

We will go live with video content related to the performing arts, and we require some additional security in the software; this security measure is still being developed.

Courtney S. Danforth