Digital Library Services

DLS continues to receive media attention in the form of last week’s Daily Iowan article: UI Libraries working on digitizing. As evidenced by another DI article written 10 months ago: Welcome the online library, the public’s curiosity continues to grow concerning the Google Book Search Project. Recent developments such as the University of California joining the project’s original partner libraries, the “Google 5″ have prompted press releases in the mainstream news.

Public misconception that all books will be made publicly available to be read online by Google may be leading to the fear that the GBS will lead to the decrease in the importance of libraries. Rather, only books in the public domain will be made completely available, so mainly the GBS will be really what its name implies, a search tool for finding books. The retrieval of those books will still very often need to occur at libraries.

Additional impact on libraries from the GBS, as Paul Soderdahl, Director of Library Information Systems, points out in the article, will come in the form of digital library departments finding freedom to digitize the “local history, original collections, and unpublished works” that their libraries have collected, and making them a part of the broader digital, scholarly record. One of the locally significant collections mentioned in the article include Samuel Calvin’s (as in the UI’s Calvin Hall) photograph collections, which depict early Iowa City as well as the wider geology of Iowa.DLS will indeed continue to keep one eye on the developments of this project and consider its impact, while continuing to focus on providing the campus and community with access to significant digital information in support of teaching, research and artistic creation. The article specifically mentioned the Iowa Digital Library, the portal through which this valuable digital content can be accessed. Go see for yourself.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian

This image is from a digitization work-in-progress of Gaspar Schott’s Physica Curiosa, originally published in 1662. Purporting to be a factual compendium of “curiosities,” the early medical book includes depictions of what we now categorize as animals, humans with congenital anomalies, and mythical creatures. Physica Curiosa is only the most recent volume featured in a series of digital imaging projects undertaken by staff from Hardin Library’s John Martin Rare Book Room.

Although he curates some of the UI’s oldest artifacts, JMRBR librarian Ed Holtum has been using its newest technology as an early adopter of digitization, with projects dating back several years before the establishment of a stand-alone digital library unit. DLS has been assisting since then in mainstreaming JMRBR image projects into the Libraries’ overall digital program — a typical activity for this phase of our development.

While early digital collections comprised stand-alone web exhibits with a background essay and a handful of images, new digital library projects incorporate digitized objects with standardized metadata; served up in an integrated content management system, these collections are transformed into more powerful and far-reaching tools for scholarship. Controlled access points now allow users to search comprehensive sets of digitized material directly, rather than pre-selected and filtered through a third party. This disintermediation of content better suits today’s researchers, adept at using Google as a jumping-off point to quickly retrieve and sort through enormous amounts of information.

Compliance to standards and best practices also enables reuse, another key principle of progressive digital library work. Once a comprehensive digital collection is complete, selected items can then be used and reused for a variety of purposes: by content providers to create web exhibits and other publications; by researches for their own scholarly efforts; and by other libraries building inter-institutional digital collections through open access data harvesting projects.

Perhaps most importantly, standardized, interoperable digital collections also enable federated searching, which encourages cross-disciplinary resource discovery. Integrated content, freed from the boundaries of individual books or discipline-based databases, will allow users to make connections across all fields of scholarship. Writer Kevin Kelly envisioned this future in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story (full text available to UI users here):

“Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together. The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t in a single, isolated book … In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.”

As with all digital library projects, the creation of the John Martin Rare Book Room digital collection brings us one step closer to this universal library.

–Jen Wolfe
Metadata Librarian

We in the Digital Library Services Department are excited by the announcement that Professor Padmini Srinivasan has received a nearly $1 Million grant to recruit students in the area of digital librarianship to the School of Library and Information Science here at The University of Iowa.

With DLS Department Head Paul Soderdahl included as Co-Principal Investigator of the grant, our department will be afforded the opportunity to partner with these students and mentor them in areas of digitization, metadata application, digital preservation and project planning.

Students will receive formal training in librarianship through SLIS with special emphasis in digital librarianship through guided experiences in local digital projects, which will strongly benefit both the cohort of students and our DLS department as well. Several projects have already been targeted because they require the kind of leadership and experience that these students can provide, such as newspaper digitization, structured textual data and institutional repository planning.

Two of the three librarians of the DLS department (me included) have just recently begun their careers in digital librarianship, so from our perspective we especially look forward to help prepare some of the 24 students selected to participate in this program for careers of their own.

–Mark F. Anderson
Digital Initiatives Librarian