Library Management Team

Notes from July 6, 2005 Meeting

Attending: Ross Atkinson, Lee Cartmill, Karen Calhoun, Tom Hickerson, Anne Kenney, Jean Poland, Sarah Thomas, Ed Weissman

1) DLF Aquifier Project

Tom provided information about the Digital Library Federation Aquifier Project and LMT discussed whether Cornell should participate. DLF Aquifier is intended to "support scholarship by building and maintaining quality collections of digital material and by making these collections available through a suite of library services tailored to scholarly discovery and use. Discovery is improved through metadata normalization and enhancement. Tools for selecting, organizing, visualizing search results and digital information, annotating and authoring are available within the service content of each library that implements DLF Aquifier." Participation is open to all DLF member libraries. The Aquifier registry of collections will be a subset of the DLF registry of collections. Tom spoke with Katherine Kott, the director of Aquifier who reported that the digital collection theme is American life and culture. All twelve of the founding partners--California Digital Library, Emory University, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Library of Congress, New York University, Stanford University, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Tennessee, University of Virginia--contribute staff to the four working groups that are designing projects that will be hosted by participating institutions. LMT asked Tom to clarify the resources Cornell would be expected to contribute and also the relationship between Aquifier and Ockham, an NSF-funded metadata harvesting project. LMT also suggested that members of the integrated framework implementation team be involved in analyzing the benefits and costs of Cornell participation in Aquifier to feed into a recommendation to LMT.

2) ARTstor

Tom reported that he was approached by the director of ARTstor about contributing locally created digital image files to ARTstor. ARTstor is a subscription-based collection of digital image files that was created with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Cornell is a subscriber. Cornell would give ARTstor non-exclusive rights to provide access to Cornell digital image files within the ARTstor collection. ARTstor would provide some funding to cover the costs for transferring the image files. The consensus was that Cornell should provide the files to ARTstor as long as this would not be too expensive because it would insure greater access to our collections as they become part of a larger collection of images. It will also make our images accessible through the ARTstor viewer, an alternative to the Luna Insight viewer. Sarah indicated that she wished for us to contribute two or three collections to ARTstor, although she wants cost estimates for doing so before we proceed.

3) RLG Fixed Price agreement

Karen and Lee reported on the recently negotiated fixed price agreement with RLG. RLG agreed to reduce next year's fixed price to take into account the severe disruption in service last spring resulting from the migration to RLIN21.

4) MyLibrary

Tom presented recommendations from the Personalized Library Services Committee concerning the future of the MyLibrary services. With Janet McCue absent, LMT deferred taking any actions until Janet has an opportunity to provide further input.

Edward Weissman