The following new material is available from the DLF webiste. Each item is
described in brief below.
1. Publications
1.1. The DLF Newsletter, July 2001 issue
1.2. Lou Pitschmann, "Building Sustainable Collections of Free Third-Party
Web Resources"
2. DLF standards and best practice
2.1. Recommended benchmark for digital reproductions of printed books and
serial publications
2.2. Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard (for recording structural,
technical, and administrative metadata)
3. Registry of digitized books and serial publications. A case for its
development and a full functional specification.
4. Updated information about the progress of projects involved in the Mellon
e-journal archiving program.
1. Publications
1.1 DLF Newsletter. The July 2001 issue
((http://www.diglib.org/pubs/news02_02/index.htm)) contains reports on
digital library developments at Columbia University, North Carolina State
University, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, University
of Pennsylvania, University of Tennessee, University of Texas at Austin,
University of Virginia, and the DLF's newest member, the University of
Washington. The issue also includes a report on recent DLF activities.
1.2. "Building Sustainable Collections of Free Third-Party Web Resources"
(June 2001) by Louis Pitschmann
(http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub98abst.html). This report is the first
in a series commissioned by the DLF to review digital collection development
strategies and practices. The report identifies and synthesizes existing
practices used in developing collections of free third-party Internet
resources that support higher education and research. A review of these
practices and the projects they support confirms that developing collections
of free Web resources is a process that requires its own set of practices,
policies, and organizational models. Where possible, the report recommends
those practices, policies, and models that have proved to be particularly
effective in terms of sustainability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and
applicability to their stated purpose. The report outlines the similarities
and differences between print and free Web resources and describes how the
nature and complexity of free Web resources comply with or challenge
traditional library practices and services pertaining to analog collections.
2. DLF standards and best practices
2.1. Recommended benchmark for digital reproductions of printed books and
serial publications. Libraries and others are digitizing increasing
quantities of printed material for online access without agreement on any
desirable level of imaging quality. The DLF is working to identify, and
build support for, specifications acceptable as the minimum necessary for
digitally reproducing printed books and serial publications with fidelity.
Adoption of such benchmarks would help users and libraries both. Users could
have more confidence in the fidelity of digital reproductions available to
them. And libraries could produce and maintain reproductions with confidence
that expensive re-digitization would not become necessary. Digital
reproductions meeting at least the benchmarks' minimum specifications would
remain viable even as reproduction techniques improved. Also, because such
texts would have well-known, consistent properties, they could support a
wide variety of uses (including uses not possible with printed texts).
Additionally, agreement on minimum benchmarks for digital reproductions of
printed publications is an essential first step for libraries that wish to
investigate whether they could manage and preserve print materials more
effectively if they relied more heavily on digital reproductions for access.
The draft benchmark is currently being reviewed by DLF member libraries who
are being asked to endorse it and is available from the DLF website at
http://www.diglib.org/standards/draftbmark.htm.
2.2. Metadata Encoding Transmission Standard (for recording structural,
technical, and administrative metadata). During the past few years, the DLF
has supported work on mechanisms for describing technical, structural, and
administrative characteristics of digital objects. Initial recommendations
about technical, structural, and administrative metadata emerged from the
Making of America II initiative (see
http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlfmoaii.htm). In recent months, these have
been refined and extended by a DLF working group into a more inclusive
"Metadata Encoding and Transmission Scheme" (METS). Work of the initiative
is fully documented on a website that is being maintained by the Library of
Congress (http://www.loc.gov/mets/. The site includes an overview and
tutorial, a beta version of the METS schema (in XML), an example METS XML
document, and METS documentation. A further meeting of the METS working
group is scheduled for September 2001. In advance of that meeting, the group
seeks review of and comments on its work, particularly on the draft schema.
All comments should be sent to Jerry McDonough at [log in to unmask]
3. Registry of digitized books and serial publications. An increasing number
of libraries and commercial entities are converting existing paper-based
books and serials to digital form. Unlike the special collections materials
that have been the focus of digital conversion in many libraries, books and
serials are commonly duplicated in many different institutions. This
presents both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is for
coordination among institutions, with each contributing to a larger shared
but distributed collection. The threat is that resources will be wasted in
the repeated digitization of the same material. A key requirement to
realizing the opportunity and avoiding the threat is a mechanism for sharing
information in a coherent fashion among institutions about what has been
digitized; that is, the creation of a Registry of digitized materials. To
facilitate the development of such a service, the DLF has worked these past
several months to outline the benefits that a registry service would offer
to the library community, and to develop a functional specification with
which such a service may be built. That work is now complete and accessible
from the DLF website at http://www.diglib.org/collections/reg/reg.htm
4. Updated information about the progress of projects involved in the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation's e-journal archiving program. The DLF maintains web
pages for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's e-journal archiving program. The
program involves seven institutions (the New York Public Library and the
university libraries of Cornell, Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania, Stanford, and
Yale) in planning digital archival repositories for e-journals. Yale,
Harvard, and Pennsylvania will work with individual publishers on archiving
the range of their electronic journals. Cornell and the New York Public
Library will work on archiving journals in specific disciplines. MIT's
project involves archiving "dynamic" e-journals that change frequently, and
Stanford's involves the development of specific archiving software tools.
The web pages (available from http://www.diglib.org/preserve/ejp.htm) offer
periodically updated progress reports from the seven institutions as well as
additional information about the projects. The progress report on work at
Yale University has been updated most recently.
