Challenge 3 Core Collection: Action Report
Thomas Izbicki (Johns Hopkins)
The group does not have a single agenda to report at this time. Does the existing data from approval vendors support a commonality? Also, the group believes serials should be considered as well because most institutions spend 75% of material dollars on serials. More people are needed to work on this challenge.
Janus Challenge 4
Licensing Principles (AKA Publisher Relations)
Breakout discussion at ALA Midwinter CCDO meeting
January 21, 2006
Proponent Group Participants:
Ivy Anderson (California Digital Library), Ivy.Anderson@ucop.edu
Susan Barribeau (Wisconsin), sbarribeau@library.wisc.edu
John Ingram (Florida), jeingr@uflib.ufl.edu
John Saylor (Cornell), jms1@cornell.edu
Charles Spetland, convenor (Minnesota), c-spet@umn.edu
Jim Stemper (Minnesota), stemp003@umn.edu
Challenge 4 Licensing Principles: Action Report
The original Janus statement #4 was entitled “Publisher relations.” The original group discussion at Cornell, and the subsequent November 2005 follow up conference call (Dianne McCutcheon, convenor (NLM), Frances Kathleen Groen (McGill), John Ingram (Florida), Ann Okerson (Yale), Victoria Owen (Toronto), Cynthia Shelton (UCLA), Charles Spetland (Minnesota), distilled the conversation to a focus on “last frontiers in licensing” (see previous post).
The January 21 group affirmed the importance of sharing information openly between ourselves, and establishing a united front amongst ARL libraries. In general, all are averse to non disclosure clauses, and in reality very few exist any more (Minnesota still sees them in several business databases). There is support for the notion of freely sharing summary information on our licenses but most see the likelihood that institutions and regional consortia will continue to negotiate individually and independently.
In the meantime, standards for publicly posting license and business terms could be drawn up. The differences between some publics and privates in what they can or must do, or not do, was recognized. There is also an obvious concern for avoiding any anti trust implications. All agreed that the first step is to be upfront with vendors that we are sharing information amongst ourselves. We also recognize that it is not just academic libraries that are affected by actions that we take or might take. Perhaps CLIR and Liblicense might continue to play roles by hosting a site posting model licensing components such as standardized wording for perpetual access, archival deposit issues for national review. It is recognized that there is a lot of coordination and human effort that must go into maintaining such a site and keeping it up to date. Still, even just being able to see what terms Institution X obtained on a certain date and whether its license is finalized or not (even if the info is not updated later) may be of immense value in the short term.
CDL’s 2005 success with Nature Publishing Group in securing new perpetual access rights was noted. This example shows the importance of rallying faculty and administration to the library’s side when taking tough negotiating stands (i.e. being willing to say No to a license is necessary if we are to truly “make every effort,” as the original Janus proposal says, to ensure that licenses have what we need).
Getting back to the original Janus Publisher Relations statement, could we not also broaden discussion to include more positive collaborative aspects of working with publishers on new models? For example, what would a national site license look like? Who could draft or define the scope of such a license? Canada, the UK and some other European countries have government funding for their national site licenses, a model probably out of the question here. Representatives from regional consortia could look at available models. Possible interest and role for ICOLC (their next meeting is in March)? Would CLIR consider hiring a consultant to explore models and draft an RFP? Before moving any further, we all need to discuss with directors and staff at our individual institutions. What implications would this sort of approach have on existing agreements?
Each of the six individuals participating in the discussion enthusiastically agreed to continue to work together (and with others) on next steps, once the process is more fully understood.
Charles Spetland (Minnesota)
Challenge 2 PROCON: Action Report
Stephen Bosch (Arizona)
The group decided that it is unreasonable to expect that all materials will be issued in digital form by 2008. Because most commercial journal publishers are already issuing their content electronically, these materials need not be considered in this challenge. The more problematic areas are the professional and small scholarly societies, and monographs. They will need assistance. Are there standards and technical infrastructure in place that these groups can learn from and coalesce with? Groups such as NISO and SPARC may be called upon to assist with standards. Also, libraries need to continue to push publishers to provide digital content and provide dollars to support worthy endeavors.
Challenge 1 RECON: Action Report
Edward Shreeves (Iowa)
The Recon group suggests hosting a meeting(s) in the near future to bring together the appropriate people and entities of expertise (ARL, LC, CRL, CLIR, CFL, etc) to:
1. look at the concept to see if it is still viable and practical;
2. look at an actual structure for managing a project of this kind;
3. develop a RFI that could be issued to determine if there are entities in place that could do some of the work.
The idea is to create a governance model of collaborative and shared ownership for creating this content. A show of hands from CCDO indicated that this challenge remained important and members would discuss it with their library directors.
Group 1 Recon – Breakout Session Notes
1/21/06
Ed Shreeves (U Iowa), Dennis Dillon (U Texas), Nancy Davenport (CLIR), Melinda Baumann (U VA), Jeanne Richardson (Arizona State U), Mark Sandler (U Michigan), Laurie Kaplan (CSA)
• The discussion started with Dennis noting that Texas is trying to decide whether to gear up their digitization project, or to shut it down. They are talking to Texas Digital Library and OCA to make the decision.
• Consider a model whereby funds are collected centrally and distributed to those making convincing proposals that meet the goals of the effort – a panel of expert peers vets proposals. Fund governed by group that puts up the capital so that it has legitimacy. The group would not control the process; these funds would be supplemental.
• Some institutions are questioning why they should digitize at all, especially more widely held titles, if Google or OCA will do it. However the quality, accessibility, and longevity of the Google/OCA versions are not clear. The argument can be made that the process should stay in the libraries to be sustainable, broadly usable, available today and tomorrow and a hundred years from now.
• Concern whether who in the library community has the required set of skills to manage this process and get it done
• OhioLink reportedly sent an RFP to vendors requesting digitizing services to be aimed at content identified by OhioLink, with little response. Commercial entities apparently want to sell their existing products, not offer services, even if paid, for conversion based on a library’s criteria
• University of Michigan is digitizing 3000 to 5000 books a year with their own staff. Converting 7 million volumes at this rate does not scale. Entities do exist who could do this work. Trade-off – Regional, local materials won’t get done. Maps, newspapers, rare books won’t be on the lists of most commercial players and many libraries will be unwilling to send these materials offsite. Management oversight is required; could have regional digitizing centers with overseeing body.
• Good result will be materials owned in common by those who support the process.
• If there is help from outside funding sources, the contract must specify that the outcome of the digitization is owned by all.
• Organizations exist already with administrative structures in place, such as ARL, CRL, CLIR, DLF, and a steering committee can offer this project to one of them to move it along
• CLIR may be available, and could work with ARL
• Government documents have to be included, and could be part of a first pass since there are no copyright issues. ARL has looked at a project to digitize them but there was no confidence in its operational skills to manage massive conversion projects. 2.2 million volumes from GPO are available for digitization.
• May not want a library group to process the materials. OCA as a possibility. Toronto project has been effective.
• Create a central fund of money from contributions and have institutions apply for funds to get the digitization done
• Issues exist within institutions – Michigan considers preservation quality v. outsourcing and has different practices in different departments within a single institution. Enforcing common practices across a national project would be much more challenging.
• Standards have to be agreed upon and then followed for all types of digitization – ocr, keying, page scanning, preservation quality – and to decide which process applies to which documents
• Standards have to be set quickly (they should not be studied and delay movement forward) and should be based on well-established existing programs which already have standards in place – Michigan, U VA, UT
• UT outsourced some digitization to another library. Metadata discussions were dragging on and in the meantime Google had already put up those titles
• Google content coming back to Michigan is so much to manage and make searchable that it will take time to become accessible. Google’s practices aren’t necessarily the standard.
• OCA with RLG and Adobe on a platform might be a way to go. OCA is interested in helping as a partner. Confident in OCA but they only at present plan to cover a small number of volumes
• Question from the earlier discussion (at CCDO meeting) regarding statistics: exactly how big would this project be – 1923 and back, numbers of newspapers and manuscripts. Michigan may have some numbers
• Eliminate (or at least defer) that which is already commercially done. Research library projects already adopted. Push information out to public or keep in ARL community? That decision may affect how project goes forward. Could work with commercial entities to try to gain access to materials already digitized if in accepted format. Access would require central ownership by ARL community.
• Look at gaps to fill and work on those volumes first.
• Talk to holders of local archives and to research societies to digitize their materials to supplement library collections
• Regional service bureaus may be created; will always have local activity
• Discussion of in-kind contributions from institutions that have already digitized large numbers of files and have capacity to do more.
• Google does not handle fragile items; those are being digitized by Michigan
• Next three months:
o Get notes on blog
o Sell concept – different interested forums – back to institutions
o Find institutions that strongly support the concept to spearhead the challenge
o Need to have collective action from ARL (Janus target)
• Smaller institutions can still digitize their collections to fill gaps
• Need an inventory of what had been done
• However, if you start double checking you never get started
• Ithaca, CDL, LC – Collaborative works; encourage them to help
• Need a central place for the project to reside with expertise in management and perhaps in management of a digitization project
• Timeline – Who – What Next
o Promote to directors and selector communities
o RFI to some entitites
o Determine if CLIR and/or ARL could host a meeting.
ß Include CDL, Ithaca (JSTOR, Portico), GPO, LC (National Digital Library Project), CRL, DLF, ARL, JISC (Stuart Dempster)
ß Create a strawman proposal
ß Reality check on concept
ß Conceptualize a management structure
ß Determine the outlines of an RFI
ß Identify some basic standards
ß RFP
o Need commitment to funding from this group (show of hands was positive)
o Pull together standards from existing projects
-Edward Shreeves
Director, Collections and Content Development
University of Iowa Libraries
Collection Development: In Response to Issues Raised at the Janus Conference, Cornell, October 2005 written by
Margaret Landesman (Marriott Library, University of Utah)
Published in Volume 7, Number 3, January 2006
Janus Challenge 4
Licensing Principles (AKA Publisher Relations)
Breakout discussion at ALA Midwinter CCDO meeting
January 21, 2006
Proponent Group Participants:
Ivy Anderson (California Digital Library), Ivy.Anderson@ucop.edu
Susan Barribeau (Wisconsin), sbarribeau@library.wisc.edu
John Ingram (Florida), jeingr@uflib.ufl.edu
John Saylor (Cornell), jms1@cornell.edu
Charles Spetland, convener (Minnesota), c-spet@umn.edu
Jim Stemper (Minnesota), stemp003@umn.edu
Challenge 4 Licensing Principles: Action Report
The original Janus statement #4 was entitled “Publisher relations.” The original group discussion at Cornell, and the subsequent November 2005 follow up conference call (Dianne McCutcheon, convener (NLM), Frances Kathleen Groen (McGill), John Ingram (Florida), Ann Okerson (Yale), Victoria Owen (Toronto), Cynthia Shelton (UCLA), Charles Spetland (Minnesota), distilled the conversation to a focus on “last frontiers in licensing” (see previous post).
The January 21 group affirmed the importance of sharing information openly between ourselves, and establishing a united front amongst ARL libraries. In general, all are averse to non disclosure clauses, and in reality very few exist any more (Minnesota still sees them in several business databases). There is support for the notion of freely sharing summary information on our licenses but most see the likelihood that institutions and regional consortia will continue to negotiate individually and independently.
In the meantime, standards for publicly posting license and business terms could be drawn up. The differences between some publics and privates in what they can or must do, or not do, was recognized. There is also an obvious concern for avoiding any anti trust implications. All agreed that the first step is to be upfront with vendors that we are sharing information amongst ourselves. We also recognize that it is not just academic libraries that are affected by actions that we take or might take. Perhaps CLIR and Liblicense might continue to play roles by hosting a site posting model licensing components such as standardized wording for perpetual access, archival deposit issues for national review. It is recognized that there is a lot of coordination and human effort that must go into maintaining such a site and keeping it up to date. Still, even just being able to see what terms Institution X obtained on a certain date and whether its license is finalized or not (even if the info is not updated later) may be of immense value in the short term.
CDL’s 2005 success with Nature Publishing Group in securing new perpetual access rights was noted. This example shows the importance of rallying faculty and administration to the library’s side when taking tough negotiating stands (i.e. being willing to say No to a license is necessary if we are to truly “make every effort,” as the original Janus proposal says, to ensure that licenses have what we need).
Getting back to the original Janus Publisher Relations statement, could we not also broaden discussion to include more positive collaborative aspects of working with publishers on new models? For example, what would a national site license look like? Who could draft or define the scope of such a license? Canada, the UK and some other European countries have government funding for their national site licenses, a model probably out of the question here. Representatives from regional consortia could look at available models. Possible interest and role for ICOLC (their next meeting is in March)? Would CLIR consider hiring a consultant to explore models and draft an RFP? Before moving any further, we all need to discuss with directors and staff at our individual institutions. What implications would this sort of approach have on existing agreements?
Each of the six individuals participating in the discussion enthusiastically agreed to continue to work together (and with others) on next steps, once the process is more fully understood.
Charles Spetland (Minnesota)
Following is the update on the archiving challenge, as refined at the ALA Midwinter meeting in San Antonio. Melissa Trevvett and Karen Schmidt invite interested libraries and organizations to indicate their interest in joining this initiative.
***
Notes for Janus Blog
Group Addressing Challenge #5: Archiving
Next Steps: Karen Schmidt and Melissa Trevvett will co-chair this working group. Members of the Working Group are:
The group plans to revise the statement that addresses the challenge, bring it to the New Orleans ALA meeting, and then agree on the next steps in this area.
The Archiving Working Group plans to revise its statement addressing the 5th Challenge: Archiving by:
1. Incorporating comments from the general discussion of the collection development officers present
• to emphasize the need to communicate about the various initiatives in print and digital archiving,
• to register the concern about paying twice for archiving of electronic information: once to the publishers and again to the archiving agency.
2. Revising the draft statement
• to ensure that more attention is given to archiving of born-digital material;
• to try to develop a way to include the Library of Congress’s holdings, U.S. and many foreign imprints, into print archive planning despite the fact that the Library cannot commit to becoming a dark archive;
• to re-work the document so that it addresses the challenge in a way that highlights the interdependencies of the kinds of archiving, points out the common elements, but recognizes the unique differences.
• to connect the archiving with the Recon challenge.
Chief Collection Development Officers Meeting
January 21, 2006
Breakout Session on Janus Conference Challenge 2: Procon
Stephen Bosch, Chair
Participants included: Deg Farrelly, Arizona State University; Ione Hooper, Alberta; Stephen Lehmann, Pennsylvania; Barbara List ,Columbia; Kathryn Loafman, University of North Texas; Carol Robinson, MIT; Steve Sowards, Michigan State University; Michael Stoller, New York University; Paul Vermouth, Harvard.
The breakout session discussed the following challenge as amended following the Janus Conferences:
PROCON: Ensuring future publications are in digital form. Research libraries are committed to moving to an environment in the medium term future (e.g., by the end of the decade), in which most newly published materials are acquired in digital form. Research libraries will work with scholars, publishers, and each other in order to achieve this. Research libraries agree to shift to e-only by 2008 for those publications that are available in both print and electronic form including: journals, reference books, textbooks, government documents and other areas like electronic books as the electronic publishing models develop. A complete transition to digital form by 2008 is dependent on the existence of trusted archives for digital content.
The group began by discussing where we believe library users stand on the transition to digital content
Many institutions have noted that students want their information in digital form
LibQual results confirm this – for students – it is less clear where faculty and other users stand on the transition
And it is not clear that anyone is demanding digital monographs
It was noted that certain publications lend themselves particularly to digital format: journals, reference works
Print needs to be a secondary format overall – it will not disappear, but it cannot predominate, as it has to date
Publishers in the natural formats – journals, reference – appear to have made the transition successfully or to be well underway
The future of the digital monograph remains in doubt, at least in the short term – and monographic publishers have not made the transition – or really even begun the process
Concerns are focused on the “quirky” publishers – the small presses, scholarly societies outside the sciences, etc.
Variations even in the humanities are dramatic
Art history seems to be making the transition – but only in the realm of digital art images – the art history monographic and journal literature is still paper-based
Music lags behind – the music itself is making the transition, but scores present serious limitations
Faculty teach what is available – video is a perfect example of this – as libraries made video available, faculty began actively to integrate it into their courses
Discussion of library assistance to publishers in the digital transition is not about creating repositories for them – they must find those resources, or the resources will need to emerge in the publishing community
Who are the players in the process?
Publishers – the small presses and societies are the primary concern here, as the large publishers have the means
Software developers – there was much discussion of the need to develop better “reading” interfaces – and indeed to see a dominant interface technology emerge
Standards organizations – NISO, DLF
Users – the scholarly societies – in this context organizations like the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association – to represent the interests of scholars
Libraries – potentially through the offices of ARL
The group discussed standards briefly
The necessary standards largely exist but need adoption by the appropriate agencies
Publishers, software developers, digitization agents of all sorts – coordination is key
There was discussion of the relationship to the evolution of licensing as a comparable phenomenon
Early development of licenses by publishers worked against the interests of libraries and scholars
Through consortia libraries were able to have an influence, and great progress has already been made in increased flexibility, etc.
An important question is whether libraries can have a similar impact on the digital transition – it’s much more complex, with more players and more complex issues
The driving force is often critical mass
The appearance of sufficient digital content in a subject or format to drive users to become comfortable with the digital format
This has happened in journal literature – even in the humanities and social sciences, where JSTOR and MUSE have set the standards
It’s happened in fields like art images and digital music
But the critical mass hasn’t emerged in monographic literature – large products like ECCO and EEBO have been important – but they’re not enough
Extensive discussion of the appropriate time frame for pushing the transition – is 2008 too soon? – for some – for how many?
There was also some discussion about the worldwide scale of the transition
How long will it take for the appropriate technology to spread to places like Africa and Latin America
There was discussion over when those geographic areas will have sufficient connectivity to make digital access to their own and other region’s materials feasible
There were equal concerns about the small presses, the small journal publishers and small scholarly societies
We don’t want to push them into the hands of the large commercial publishers – as happened extensively in the sciences
The group remained in agreement that 2008 might be a viable date for some publications
For journal literature, with some exceptions as noted already among small societies and presses
For reference publishing
For government documents
It will likely take longer in other areas
Mass digitization – the Google project and others - may finally push the monographic publishers to move to digital for new publications – as mass digitization may create the critical mass to accustom users to the digital monograph
But small presses, societies, and less developed portions of the world may lag behind and need a great deal of help
Again, we don’t want to drive them into commercial hands by pushing too soon and too hard
The group’s conclusions focused on the need to work through the professional associations
On the library side, primarily ARL as a driving force, as it has been in scholarly communication more broadly
On the scholars’ side, through organizations like the MLA and the AHA
This is my understanding of the action items as a result of the Janus Discussion at CCDO ALA-Midwinter Meeting – January 21, 2006. This meeting was very heavily attended, so please post your comments or any additions or corrections to this.
Action Items – Executive Summary
While everyone thought that more concrete plans could have come out of this meeting, everyone also agreed that nothing completely dropped off the agenda.
CCDO will put out a call to its’ membership for:
• a steering committee to take the initiatives forward,
• institutions to put resources into the challenges they are interested in working on.
1. RECON- Will call a meeting of appropriate organizations and institutions (LC, ARL, CRL, CLIR, DLF, etc) to create and manage a collaborative to accomplish this goal. Will be closely tied to #5. Edward Shreeves, UIA chairs this group.
2. PROCON – Committed to an e-only shift by 2008. This date was deemed possible for a number of disciplines. Steve Bosch, UAZ chairs this group.
3. Core Definition – Will continue to discus further. There was not wide support for this. Thomas Izbicki, JHU chairs this group.
4. Licensing Principles – Will consider re-broadening its scope to Publisher Relations and will look into producing a RFP for a national site license to a digital resource as a pilot to push the concept. Charles Spetland, UMN chairs this group.
5. Archiving - Invite a group of organizations (LC, ARL, CRL, CLIR, DLF, etc) and interested libraries to work together. Karen Schmidt and Melissa Trevett will lead this,
6. Alternative Channels - Group will continue to work on identifying tasks. General agreement on instituion contributing $50K annualy to central fund to be used as venture capital perhaps in conjunction with SPARC. Margaret Landesman, UUT and Bonnie MacEwan, Auburn University chair this group.
Jane Penner, Director of Content Management Services at UVa suggested that Janus results/plans be presented at the next DLF Meeting.
- John M. Saylor
Coordinator of Collection Development
Cornell University Library