IFLA Working Group on Digital Library Inventories

Archive - Historical Material

Notes from the Group's first meeting, held during the Bangkok Conference, August 25, 1999.

Present:

This was an informal meeting of people involved in the development of inventories of digital collections. The meeting was not concerned with the digitisation process or the digitisation of collections themselves, but solely with the large number of inventories or directories which are being created with the aim of listing digitisation activity in one form or another.

Those attending the meeting were invited because they were known to be involved in some sort of digital library inventory and were already attending the IFLA Conference. It is recognised that there are many more projects and organisations with similar aims which were not represented.

Aim of the meeting

What does not appear to exist is very much coordination between these projects. While the stated aim of many inventories is to reduce duplication of effort when digitising collections, there appears to be no attempt to avoid duplication of effort when creating the inventories themselves, since little regard appears to be paid to what type of directory or inventory exists already. Unless interoperability, or at least cooperation, between different inventories is given high priority, it is difficult to see how a duplication of digitisation effort can be achieved.

The aims of the meeting were

• to inform each other about our various inventory projects currently in progress
• to identify areas of mutual concern
• to consider what benefit there would be in attempting to coordinate the work of the various projects
• to recognise the need for consistency between different inventories and to encourage interoperability

The challenge of creating an effective inventory

• a survey to examine current activity in the area of digitisation of cultural heritage collections worldwide, resulting in a report of the survey results. The report has been published as International Preservation Issues, No 2.
• the development of a web-based "Directory of Digitised Library Collections". This Directory aims to list major cultural heritage library collections which have been digitised. As part of the "Memory of the World" Programme, the emphasis is on cultural heritage collections and major libraries and other important cultural institutions. The Directory will be hosted eventually and maintained in the long term by UNESCO
• A report on digital preservation. This will consist of an extended article to be published in International Preservation News, and will highlight current activity in this important area.

This sort of challenge might be overcome by using search engines which would search not only the international directory itself but also all of the linked sites, so that a full search could be made. Of course this might only possible where a common data model existed, which does not yet appear to be being developed in this area.

Interoperability and cooperation

The Russian Digital Library project aims to become a one-stop shop for digital library issues. The website would include digitised collections, and digital library events and bibliographies, and represents another national development in the area of digital library inventories. The IFLA Section on Information Technology (SIT) had also explored in some detail the feasibility of developing an international digital library inventory, a proposal that the Section had been keen to pursue in 1998. However there was doubt over the need for another international inventory, which may be similar but unrelated to the IFLA/UNESCO Directory, especially in view of the earlier agreement that new inventories should not now be developed in isolation. This issue is still being discussed within the Section.

There was general agreement that cooperation, coordination and interoperability should be key considerations in the area of digital library inventories. Work on defining collection profiles and interoperability standards should take priority over the development of new inventories per se.

In order to build on the very useful discussions of this first meeting, Terry Kuny agreed to set up a closed mailing list for those who attended this meeting and others who had an interest in this area. The list and the group would be called the Inventories WG. Terry would also allocate an area of Iflanet, to which he would add documents relating to existing standards for describing digital collections (EAD, ZIG ...), definitions of data models, and other items including a scope note about this new working group. One of the major benefits of this meeting was the opportunity for different sections and groups within IFLA to come together to explore common concerns, and to identify areas in which closer cooperation may be possible in the future.

Sara Gould
November 1999