Digitisation and Resource Discovery (SCDRD) Report 2010/2011
LIBER Steering Committee on Digitisation and Resource Discovery
The work of the Steering Committee on Digitisation and Resource Discovery in 2010–2011 has been based on the LIBER strategy and the LIBER Digitisation Roadmap and the issues expressed in the documents.
The chair of the Steering Committee was nominated as the vice president of LIBER at the 2010 annual conference. Some of the activities reported relate to this position.
REPORT FOR 2010/2011
1. Steering Committee and working groups
· Meeting of the Steering Committee and the Working Groups in Århus on 29th June.
The meeting of the working groups was open to all delegates and they were invited to participate
· The working groups were organised:
- Digitisation working group: Jeannette Frey, BCU Lausanne, (chair), Lone Stefansen, Graeme Forbes
- Europeana working group: Mike Mertens, Research Libraries UK, (chair): Christy Henshaw
· The Steering Committee and working groups has had another meeting in Lausanne in November to discuss the aims of the Digitisation Steering committee and working groups and define core activities. It was decided that the work will be based on a couple of core activities the main focus being organising the Digitisation workshop together with EBLIDA in October 2010.
· The LIBER Digitization Working Group met in Lausanne (CH) on November 3, 2010. 9 members where present, 5 more gave some feedback per e-mail. The focus was on Creation of digitization metadata: existing standards for text, pictures, audio and video, usage of standard or non-standard digitization metadata in Europe, and best practice to be proposed to LIBER members.
Standards do exist for every category of materials. The most widely used standards are METS, MODS, MARCXML, and FOXML. Other standards used are AES (audio), MXF (television material), TEI (Manuscripts), ALTO and PREMIS. But some projects in Serbia and Hungary do not use standardized metadata.
Lots of information is already available about digitization on the Web. None the less, the working group members find it useful to provide best practices through the LIBER Web site to LIBER members, provided that they are kept short and efficient. This will be done on the new LIBER Web site as soon as possible after its launch.
· Although the LIBER Europeana Working Group has not yet formally convened there has been consultation with both LIBER and Europeana. Two of the chief areas that have come into closer relief since the end of last year are those of IPR and licensing, in respect of both the digitization of orphan/out-of-commerce works, and of metadata. In further discussion with the chair of the SCDRD, a modulation of the remit of the Europeana Working Group might usefully bring into more explicit play the work on open licences that the JISC and RLUK are currently pursuing in relation to metadata. There is also the prospect that similarly, issues around the viability and feasibility of LIBER libraries adopting linked data approaches to making their resources more visible and reusable can be profitably evaluated as part of the EWG's programme. Such a rebalancing will hopefully help to address both digitization and resource discovery aspects of the overall SCDRD remit in the context of Europeana.
2. Digitisation Workshop
· LIBER and EBLIDA organise jointly the 3rd Digitisation workshop in October 2011 in The Hague.
· A joint programme committee has been established
· LIBER and EBLIDA members have had meetings and several Skype calls during 2010 and 2011 to discuss issues related to the workshop
· Meetings
o IFLA in August 2010
o Europeana conference in November 2010
· Four themes established for the workshop: User Experience, Business Models, Reuse (metadata), Workflow
· Call for papers opened in March, closed in late May
· Chairs of the sessions from both LIBER and EBLIDA
3. European level activities
· Contact with European Commission’s Reflection Group on digitisation
· Positive feedback towards cooperation
· Consultation on how best to foster the online presence of cultural heritage, SC response in September 2010
· Contact with the Jisc Guide – Open Bibliographic Data working group
- Follow-up of the process of the document. Mike Mertens participated the meeting in 2011
- JISC representative participating in the workshop as invited speaker
· PSI consultation by November 30. The wiki was used to compile the comments of the digitisation group.
4. Europeana
· The chair of Digitisation Steering Committee and vice president of LIBER has been nominated the representative of LIBER at Europeana board. In addition she was nominated to the Europeana Executive board
· Main activities of Europeana Foundation 2010/2011 have been
o Forming the Europeana foundation. The Foundation is incorporated under Dutch law as Stichting Europeana and is housed within the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the national library of the Netherlands. It provides a legal framework for the governance of Europeana, employing the staff, bidding for funding and enabling the sustainability of the service.
o Europeana- think culture- strategic plan 2011-2015.
o Promoting Europeana at member states
5. Increased visibility
· Finland : regular communication with the Finnish libraries
· In the UK, RLUK is expanding its role aspirationally to include being an aggregator for Europeana, in a drive to get more research libraries content into the service, referencing LIBER thinking. RLUK is also undertaking a whole new strategic strand of activity around promoting special collections for research, partly in conjunction with OCLC, and is also looking to partner specifically with LIBER (and CERL) in this regard. This is potentially a fruitful area of future concern, and a possible focus for instigating new collaborative frameworks of action.
The LIBER wiki of Digitization and Resource Discovery (http://liberwiki.nationallibrary.fi) serves as the working environment for the steering committee, working groups and all those interested in joining the work. The wiki environment will be moved to the new LIBER web site during 2011.
