German Resources Project Digital Libraries Working Group Minutes
Spring Meeting, March 1999

PARTICIPANTS

Those present at the meeting were:

  1. Helene Baumann hsb@mail.lib.duke.edu
  2. Jürgen Bunzel bunzel@IIIN2.dfg.d400.de
  3. James Campbell campbell@virginia.edu
  4. Marianne Dörr doerr@vd17.bsb.badw-muenchen.de
  5. Berndt Dugall dugall@stuB.uni-frankfurt.d400.de
  6. Wilfried Enderle enderle@ mail.sub.uni-goettingen.de
  7. Richard Hacken Richard_Hacken@byu.edu
  8. Elmar Mittler mittler@mail.sub.uni-goettingen.de
  9. Winfried Mühl muehl@mail.sub.uni-goettingen.de
  10. Michael Seadle seadle@mail.lib.msu.edu (coordinator)

It is important to note that this discussion included a substantial German contingent, including representatives of both the Göttingen and Bavarian digitization centers, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The results were worked out in a concensus process.

MISSION STATEMENT
The Digital Libraries Working Group encourages and fosters the digitization of important research-oriented materials to be made broadly available to the world via the Internet. Among this group's tasks are to assist in the funding and completion of such digital collections, while agreeing on standards for interoperability, metadata, and identifying useful items/collections.

CLEARING HOUSE CONCEPT

The key result of this meeting was the clearing house concept. The clearing house provides a mechanism to foster a wide variety of digital library projects and to bring them under the aegis of the German Resources Project (GRP) while leaving the initiative for individual projects with the institutions involved. One of the goas of the clearing house is to bring a variety of funding sources to GRP initiatives.

The clearing house has four parts:

The group defined four provisional themes. The idea was to have themes which supplied needs on both sides of the Atlantic. It was very clear from the discussion that the digital library themes would not be strictly German studies based. The four themes were:
  1. German 18th and 19th century history.
  2. American 18th and 19th century history
  3. World War One.
  4. Witch trials/Hexenverfolgen.

Although the group was willing to add or modify these themes based on discussions with the other working groups, especially the collection development group, there was particular interest in the latter two.

Two kinds of resources were identified here: collections and funding. The presumption was that individual institutions knew best what interesting and unique collections they had that might fit the themes above, and that they were also in the best position to go out to funding agencies. The clearing house provides a mechanism for matching collection strengths with research needs (below), with possible trans-Atlantic partners, and with possible funding agencies. We did not discuss precisely how this matching would work, or how actively the GRP would attempt to make matches.

The idea was to be able to demonstrate a clear need to funding agencies for particular digital library projects. One example of a means for determining demand was the NEH research seminars at which faculty describe future research agendas from which a demand for collections will flow.

A database that would list new projects, started under the aegis of the GRP, and also point to existing projects which contribute to one or more of the project themes.

SUBCOMMITTEES

Participants recognized that many details of the clearing house mechanism remained to be worked out before implementation would be possible. They also recognized that cooperation with the other working groups would be necessary. Therefore the following subcommittees were established:

Members of this subcommittee are: Mary Jackson, Elmar Mittler, and Michael Seadle. Its charge is to investigate the copyright implications of German-American projects.

Members of this subcommittee are: Richard Hacken, and "someone from Göttingen." Its charge is to coordinate with the collection development working group.

Members of this subcommittee are: Wilfred Enderle and Jim Niessen. Its charge is to find existing sites that meet out topic and other criteria, and to publish a list on the Web.

Members of this subcommittee are: Jim Campbell. Its charge is to investigate the operational and technical aspects of the clearing house proposal.

INTEROPERABILITY/TECHNICAL ISSUES

Participants agreed on the principle of full information capture, and agreed not to attempt to define that precisely in terms of dpi or bit depth.

Participants agreed on Dublin Core as a minimum standard. One of our goals is to capture structural as well as bibliographic information. We discussed having cataloging in the language of the work and reached general agreement that this was desirable. Whether it is achievable may be another matter.

We discussed launching a project that would establish mirrored-databases with metadata about relevant digital library holdings to enable rapid and efficient local searching. This might be possible via an International Digital Library Cooperative Research grant in which this kind of metadata sharing would be tested as one model of digital publication.