Digital Library Services

Today’s Daily Iowan features an article on the Horvat Collection of science fiction fanzines that the UI Libraries purchased last year after it was spotted on eBay. Included is coverage of DLS’ efforts to develop a searchable database of fanzine table of contents pages that should provide science fiction scholars with a powerful tool to pinpoint their research efforts.

To expand a little on the article:

– The Digital Collections department is more commonly (and more accurately) known as the Digital Library Services department, but who’s counting?

– Student assistant Sarah Remington’s observation about science fiction fanzine imagery can be corroborated here, here and especially here.

– Student assistant Don Dunbar has also spent many long hours working on the project, and was instrumental in our efforts to reconcile METS implementation with our digital asset management system.

– The project is still very much in its infancy, but we hope to get some content available soon, so check back. In the meantime, check out this FAQ to find out more of the technical details.

Many thanks to reporter Ray Mattson and The Daily Iowan for helping publicize the Horvat collection and our efforts to make its contents more accessible.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian

July at the UI Libraries is Annual Report-writing time, with each department submitting a list of statistics, projects, awards, and other accomplishments for possible inclusion in the official end-of-fiscal-year publication. Although DLS has only existed half the year, with much of that time spent on department start-up, we still managed to accumulate a fair amount of bullet points in our list; see below for a full and uncut sneak-preview edition.

One major accomplishment not appearing on the list: surviving June’s professional development tour, with DLS staff attending no less than three library conferences in Knoxville, Chapel Hill and New Orleans. Luckily, as native Midwesterners, we’ve built up considerable tolerance to humidity; this allowed us to brave the climate in order to attend sessions on emerging tools, standards and best practices in digital librarianship. This newly acquired knowledge will help us to improve efficiency and design higher quality, more user-friendly digital projects as we work towards our next milestone.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian

Digital Library Services 2005/06

• Digital Library Services became fully-staffed and operational on Jan. 1, 2006. In addition to developing departmental infrastructure, plans and procedures, DLS launched the Iowa Digital Library, featuring 16 new and legacy digital initiatives comprising nearly 68,000 digital objects, created in collaboration with UI faculty, staff and community partners. Highlights include:
  – The Mujeres Latinas Digital Collection: Working with the Iowa Women’s Archives on their Year of Public Engagement grant-funded project, DLS coordinated the digitization of photographs, correspondence, newspaper clippings and audio interviews documenting the family and community history of Iowa’s Latino immigrant population.
  –The Irving Weber Digital Collection: With the support of the Iowa City Host Noon Lions Club, DLS digitized the well-known eight-volume local history Irving Weber’s Iowa City, capturing 482 stories from the city’s founding through the 1990s, for inclusion in the Iowa Heritage Digital Collections project.
  –The John P. Vander Maas Railroadiana Collection: Seeking to do less with more under tight budgetary constraints, DLS helped coordinate a cross-departmental library initiative, working with Special Collections, Preservation, and Circulation staff members to digitize over 2600 historic photographs documenting the American railroad industry’s progress in Iowa.
• DLS partnered with Preservation to provide assistance and expertise for participants in the Iowa Heritage Digital Collections, featuring 13,640 digital objects from Iowa museums, historical societies and academic and public libraries. In addition to traveling throughout the state to provide onsite training and support at individual institutions, DLS staff also taught an introductory workshop on digitization at a statewide library conference.
• Working towards the Libraries’ strategic goal to provide support for changes in scholarly communication, DLS has made progress toward developing electronic publishing initiatives, including:
  –coordinating with the University of Iowa Press to develop a digital collection of out-of-print monographs;
  –working with academic departments to develop an open-access repository for journal articles written by UI faculty and graduate students;
  –providing expertise and technical support to the Writing University Task Force on the development of the Virtual Writing University.

Often, following a proposal to digitize a collection of materials, one of the first questions to be raised is “What is this going to cost?” If the digitization is to be outsourced to a corporation, what will be the cost per page (or image)? How much more will it cost for the OCR of text and cleanup of images? If the digitization is to be done in-house, what will this cost in terms of staff time and equipment? What will it cost to add value with robust metadata and broad searchabiltiy? What will it cost to backup this valuable information once it is digitized?

Undoubtedly, these are all valid questions and cost should be examined carefully, but nowhere is the importance of this last question more evident than in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Last week, the DLS staff returned from the American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans where time was spent listening to and conversing with librarians from all over the nation.

One of the most interesting things that I heard was from John C. Kelly, Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of New Orleans. He described that following Hurricane Katrina, when he returned to his library, materials were submerged in several feet of mud for weeks. Much of their digital library’s content had been archived on CDs, and when they began pulling discs out, washing them off, and testing them, only a few were ruined to the point that information was lost!

Certainly it is tragic that so many important books, documents and other paper items were lost to the aftermath of the hurricane, but in this case, digital information showed its resilience in the face of harsh environmental conditions. This is no reason to overlook the importance of offsite storage and backup, and should only be looked upon as an interesting anecdote, but it’s worth remembering that any kind of digitization and backup may in some cases be the only reason some information will survive a disaster.

–Mark Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian, Digital Library Services