January 29-30, 1996
Attendance: Task Force members: Susan Rosenblatt, University of California, Berkeley; Carol Mandel, Columbia University; Deanna Marcum, Commission on Preservation and Access; Ross Atkinson, Cornell University; Selden Deemer, Emory University; Dale Flecker, Harvard University; Sarah Thomas, The Library of Congress; Wendy Lougee, University of Michigan; Peter Hirtle, National Archives; Heike Kordish, New York Public Library; Gloriana St. Clair, Pennsylvania State University; Lynn Sipe, University of Southern California; Anthony Angiletta, Stanford University; Joe Rader, University of Tennessee; Donald Waters, Yale UniversityConsultants: Patricia Battin, Consultant; Henry Gladney, IBM Almaden Research Center
Permanent Guest: George Farr, National Endowment for the Humanities
The meeting was convened at 2 p.m. by Pat Battin. After introductory remarks by Deanna Marcum and Pat Battin, the group turned to subcommittee reports and discussion as outlined in the agenda. The subcommittees' written reports are included as a record of the meeting's minutes and are referred to rather than repeated in this summary.
Wendy Lougee led the discussion on this subcommittee's deliberations. She noted two major tensions that arose during their discussions: 1) heterogeneity of information sources, content and user access; and 2) resolution of libraries' bibliographic history and new digital approaches.
The group discussed the following questions:
The subcommittee urged two immediate actions to further resolution of these issues:
Lougee summarized four possibilities for discovery and retrieval, each choice influencing the metadata requirements: A union catalog for the NDLF
In the extensive discussion that followed, a variety of points were made underscoring the complexity of metadata issues. The following issues were emphasized:
The group recommended two projects to explore the metadata issues:
Henry Gladney reported on the Interoperability Subcommittee's meeting. He had convened an enlarged group including IBM computer scientists, Susan Hockey (CETH), and Ira Fuchs (Princeton). Their discussion centered on process, including the following issues:
The group discussed the need to identify priorities in the corporate community and to articulate the urgent requirements for the higher education community. Gladney urged that we not overspecify our needs and thus lose credibility with the corporate community. There was consensus that NDLF development should not be dependent upon client machines because of the vast range of levels in academic institutions. It was agreed that a few projects based on the range of interoperability issues encountered by all the subcommittees to explore the requirements by discipline and type of data would be useful.
Task Force members were asked to send to Gladney 1) a list of their digital collections; 2) data elements and characteristics; and 3) degree of investment.
(Later in the meeting, it was agreed to disband the Interoperability Subcommittee, with Gladney serving as an important technical resource and liaison with corporate developments. Battin will establish a liaison with the Common Solutions Group, an organization of twenty-five research universities working on common solutions to an effective distributed computing environment. They are already working on similar issues; we need to work with them to confirm the essential functions and determine their development status.)
The subcommittee reported that the major issues are policy, since the consensus, as reported in the AAP's publication, Strategy for Copyright Management in the Network Environment, is that the technology for rights management is available. The group then engaged in an extensive discussion of varying points of view on who will have access and how. The debate largely focused on "free," cost-recovery, and cost-plus principles. It was agreed that the overarching principle for DLF is the maximization of information access to scholars. Given that assumption, what are the operating principles for DLF? The discussion included the following points of view:
The discussion then moved to the distinctions between licensing and ownership, with considerable debate over the definition of ownership and how to achieve it in the digital environment. It was agreed that the subcommittee should pursue the following issues:
It became clear that a well-defined taxonomy of resources and rights is essential for clarifying the issues and recommending policies on rights management.
The Rights Subcommittee was asked to develop a taxonomy of resources and rights.
Don Waters noted that he had not convened the DLF Subcommittee on Archiving in anticipation of the Commission on Preservation and Access/RLG Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information (DATF) Final Report due April 1, 1996. He identified three important policy decisions for DLF consideration:
He raised the following questions for discussion:
In response to the possibility of NDLF serving as a testbed for the DATF concepts, Deanna Marcum noted that she has convened a March 4, 1996, meeting with representatives from OCLC, Library of Congress, and RLG to discuss the implications of the DATF report for the bibliographic utilities.
Heike Kordish presented the report of the Economics Subcommittee. The ensuing discussion ranged over a variety of issues, including descriptions of current activities and policies in a number of institutions. The need for a taxonomy of resources and rights was emphatically reiterated. Traditional library costs are not well understood, infrastructure costs are not easily identified, and cost centers are shifting. It was agreed that fuller cost-analyses were needed; it was recommended that subcommittee members be assigned different models for fuller explication and analysis, including separation of costs of content from access and maintenance services. There was general agreement that the DLF objective is to federate institutional interests, rather than to create another entity.
The group asked the subcommittee to prepare cost analyses for the following models:
Sarah Thomas reported on the naming convention activity at LC, indicating that an updated report is available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/naming.html. She invited recommendations from NDLF.
Several concerns noted by PTF members included a desire for fuller analysis of four current naming conventions schemes, incompatibility of naming convention-embedded software and the need for resolution software to be built into individual PCs. It was noted that the Common Solutions Group (CSG) is working on these issues.
A project to mount a format-based project to test the interoperability of naming conventions was proposed, with the Cornell-Michigan Making of America venture recommended as the testbed.
During the course of the two-day meeting, it had become apparent that interoperability issues are inextricably entwined with all other subcommittee concerns and that we had created an artificial and inhibiting separation by assigning those issues to a separate subcommittee. It was agreed that the Interoperability Subcommittee would be disbanded and that Battin would contact the CSG to establish a working partnership. (Subsequent to the meeting, in a conversation with Ken King, Chairman of the CSG, Sue Rosenblatt was designated as the DLF liaison.) The group agreed that the four important issues for consultation with the CSG are the following, in order of priority:
PTF members were asked to consider the following proposed projects and work on implementation plans during the next two months. Battin will call each of the subcommittee convenors in February to confirm their agreement on assignments and plans for project implementation.
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