Before any potential initiatives are pursued, communication and consensus among members of the Digital Libraries Working Group are essential. The action items below come from discussions held at the Munich meetings and are only a list of possible ways / initiatives / projects in which the working group might proceed. It seems clear from our discussions that there are three general categories for action in which the GRP Digital Libraries Working Group can be most effective (only the first two of which are practical for action items at the present). In broad terms, these are to: I. Encourage and support creation of digitized German resources that do not yet exist.
II. Find and list / display digitized German resources that do exist.
III. Look / lobby / work toward future centralized solutions for the creation and display of digital resources.In each of these three categoriess, specific potential initiatives toward the larger goal have come up in discussions here in Munich. Details about each initiative will be kept to a minimum here, but they will be the topic of working group thought and can be discussed later at GRP meetings or earlier by contacting the coordinator and working group. Please feel free to suggest other similar initiatives with which we might support the creation or display of German digital resources. I. Encourage and support creation of digitized German resources that do not yet exist.A. Yale University has a large collection of 17th-18th century German dissertations that could be digitized and made available to the scholarly community. While the materials could be digitized locally, the DLWG might help line up help with metadata creation and funding support.
Contact person at Yale: Dale Askey. Other contact persons: TBA. B. Rare or endangered materials on World War I at the University of Wisconsin are another potential area of digital cooperation with the DLWG. Given the broad and distributed nature of similar materials, other libraries may be able to cooperate with digitization of their own World War I collections (one example: the Bavarian State Library?). The digitized materials could be given immediate and broad publicity through an existing gateway at BYU, the World War I Document Archive.
Contact person at Wisconsin: Barbara Walden. Contact person at BYU: Richard Hacken. Other contact persons: TBA. C. Universitätsbibliothek Stuttgart and the Bibliotheksservice Zentrum Baden-Württemberg are contemplating a project to prepare table-of-content information for German books. Thus, another potential initiative, in cooperation with the Bibliographic Control Working Group, would be to arrange insertion of this digital information into our North American MARC records. Northwestern is a possible partner on the endeavor.
Contact person at BSZ: Frank Scholze. Contact person at Northwestern: Jeffery Garrett. Contact person on Bibliographic Control Working Group: Roger Brisson. Other contact persons: TBA. Each of the initiatives listed above (along with others that might be proposed) potentially incorporate types of working group assistance discussed in Munich: institutional matchmaking, along with help or guidance in areas of funding, metadata, and other technical issues -- including OAI implementation. These various areas of assistance require the resources of the working group as a team with widely different talents.
II. Find and list / display digitized German resources that do exist.A. Work on creating a German-Resources-Project-specific OAI harvester. The goal would be to have a searchable digital resource database that would display near-real-time links to scholarly resources in German studies. It would be customized to include digitized materials from selected library sites and to winnow those sites by subject. An integral and necessary part of this initiative, both for the first version and for future improvements, would be to encourage libraries with relevant German resources to make their sites OAI-compliant (to the degree they are not already so).
Contact person at Michigan State: Michael Seadle. Contact person at BYU: Richard Hacken. Other contact persons: TBA. B. Work on creating a traditional Internet gateway that forges links by discipline to those sites with relevant digitized resources in German studies. Linking to other gateways would facilitate its utility, especially to scholarly German virtual libraries such as Vascoda or Vifanet. Consultation with Webis, the site for German Sondersammelgebiete (areas of local subject specialization), would also help set parameters for at least the German side of the project. At the point that the OAI harvester (initiative II A, above) reaches a state of utility rendering the traditional gateway superfluous, the two initiatives could merge. For the foreseeable future, however, it is thought that a standard gateway might provide a useful tool for a scholarly overview of current and available (not merely proposed) digital projects..
Contact person at BYU: Richard Hacken. Other contact persons: TBA.
III. Look / lobby / work toward future centralized solutions for the creation and display of digital resources.The presence and presentations of Melissa Trevvett from the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) provoked some blue-sky dreaming about possible digital futures in at least some of those present. It seems clear that a centralized institution (not necessarily CRL) would -- when finances and other conditions are right -- be in a position to not only digitize on demand for scholars, but to digitize rare and endangered materials for member libraries that might request this type of preservation. Duplication of effort in digitizing could be minimized. Inherent in this dreamed-of future would be the requisite metadata and cataloging processes that could make a truly universal digital library available to scholars. The final product at the interface end would represent a digital-library equivalent of OCLC's WorldCat or RLG's RLIN to link to the item sought. (Question to investigate: To what degree is this idea, at least the bibliographic control portion of it, already on OCLC's or RLG's radar scope and menu plan?)
At the very least, the Digital Libraries Working Group should investigate the possibilities of more comprehensive and cooperative digitization and processing programs.
Contact persons/investigator-lobbyists: TBA. Final Note: A report of initiatives being pursued -- or yet to be pursued -- by the Digital Libraries Working Group will be given at the next general meeting of the German Resources Project.