From your 1998-99 OCLC Users' Council Delegates:
   Marcia Talley                  Arlene Luster
   [log in to unmask]         [log in to unmask]
   ph: 410-293-6905               ph: 808-449-2209

Hello, all.

I'm sending you this email for two reasons.  First, it outlines the issues
that OCLC Users' Council will be taking up at the fall meeting from
October 4-6, 1998. If you have any thoughts on these issues, please
communicate them to me or to Arlene by COB on September 29 so that we may
make your opinions known to OCLC.

Secondly, the message contains sources of excellent information about
digital libraries which you might find useful.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Marcia Talley

 ========================================================================

The topic for the next OCLC Users' Council meeting is "Digital Libraries:
Looking at the Future of the Information Industry."  The speakers promise
to engage us in considering how libraries, networks, and OCLC can
accomplish the transition to a digital library.  Specifically, we will
address the following key questions:

* What are the trends/expected scenarios in the computing, political, and
publishing environments that will affect further development of the
digital library?

* What are the likely impacts in the next five years of these changes on
libraries and OCLC?

* What are the opportunities for and barriers to the deployment of the
digital library?

* How can libraries, networks, and OCLC work together to develop the
digital library?


OVERVIEW, BACKGROUND, AND ISSUES

Digital Libraries: a Selected Resource Guide.
http://www.lita.org/ital/1603_klemperer.htm

Originally published in "Information Technology and Libraries"  (September
1997), this web-accessible article provides a "linked" summary of a
variety of issues, initiatives, and developments in digital libraries.
Authors Katharina Klemperer and Stephen Chapman cover general resources;
retrospective conversion and preservation; project planning;  selection;
imaging; standards and guidelines; preservation; management issues;
metadata; naming conventions; archiving digital information;  intellectual
property rights; infrastructure architecture; and initiatives to follow.

International Federation of Library Associations
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/II/diglib.htm

IFLAs site provides this internationally exhaustive resource which
includes: a digital library bibliography; links to relevant periodicals,
conferences, and organizations; and a listing of digital library projects
around the world.

Digital Libraries Column (Library Journal)
http://www.bookwire.com/LJDigital/diglibs.articles

Roy Tennant's continuing digital libraries column in "Library Journal"  is
an excellent and readable review of issues and questions related to
transitioning to the digital library.  Accessible to the non-specialist,
sample column titles include: "So Much to Digitize, So Little Time (and
Money)," "Interoperability: the Holy Grail," "21st-Century Cataloging,"
"The Banal Barrier," and "Digital Potential and Pitfalls."

Jacobson, Frances F., ed., Children and the Digital Library, "Library
Trends" (Spring 1997).

This thematic issue addresses the digital library and its potential to
serve children and learning.  Topics considered are learning in the
digital library; information seeking in a digital age; and visioning the
future.

D-Lib Magazine http://www.dlib.org/

D-Lib is a monthly compilation of contributed stories, commentary, and
briefings on digital libraries research, metrics, and test-beds.  The
July/August issue includes an important article by Stephen M. Griffin,
Program Director for Special Projects Digital Libraries Initiative of the
National Science Foundation entitled "NSF/DARP/NASA Digital Libraries
Initiative: A Program Managers Perspective."

Digital Library News http://cimic.rutgers.edu/~ieeedln/

Digital Library News is published by the IEEE Computer Society Task Force
on Digital Libraries and by Advances in Digital Libraries, an annual
conference.  Digital Library News provides a "periodic electronic snapshot
and alerting service for the Digital Libraries field."  Articles are be
brief with pointers to sites containing more information.

University of California at Berkeley's Digital Library Project
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Info/

The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE maintains an especially helpful
"Information" page which provides excellent overview and general resources
related to building digital collections and services.

INITIATIVES AND EXAMPLES

The Digital Library Federation (DLF)
http://www.clir.org/diglib/dlfhomepage.htm

DLF was founded in 1995 to "establish the conditions for creating,
maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed collection of digital
materials accessible to scholars, students, and a wider public."
Participants manage and operate digital libraries.

The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH)
http://www-ninch.cni.org/

NINCH is a "broad coalition of arts, humanities and social science
organizations formed to assure the fullest possible participation of the
cultural sector in the new digitally networked environment.  In this
endeavor, NINCH seeks to encourage the development of the National
Information Infrastructure as a means to preserve, access and creatively
build upon our cultural legacy, in a manner that embraces the fullest
understanding of the nation's cultural heritage--the totality of human
work, creative effort and thought manifest in the United States, today and
in the past."

Digital Libraries Initiatives http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/national.htm

The Digital Libraries Initiative is comprised of six projects in the joint
initiative of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for digital libraries.  These
institutional projects seek to develop tools for information discovery,
management, retrieval and analysis.  The DLI projects are: University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford
University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California
at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.

The United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/

The UK Office for Library and Information Networking is a national center
for support in network information management in the library and
information communities. It provides awareness, research and information
services.  The UKOLN maintains this site which covers initiatives in the
UK.

Library of Congress. Digital Library Collections http://lcweb.loc.gov/

The National Digital Library is an effort to digitize and deliver
electronically the distinctive, historical Americana holdings at the
Library of Congress, including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, maps,
recorded sound, and moving pictures.  American Memory
(http://lcweb2.loc.gov/amhome.html) is a major component of the Program
and includes multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs,
recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library's Americana
collections.

The Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award/index.html

With a gift from Ameritech, the Library of Congress has sponsored a
competition to enable public, research, and academic libraries, museums,
historical societies, and archival institutions to create digital
collections of primary resources.  The award-winners accessible through
the site demonstrate the range of possibilities inherent in digital
libraries.