From Jay Jordan

Digital collections, e-learning and libraries

Jay Jordan

Beginning in the 1970s, library catalogs started to go online record by record, keystroke by keystroke. Today, library collections themselves are starting to go online, slowly but surely. At the same time, colleges and universities and other organizations are starting to build digital repositories for the intellectual output of their institutions. Simultaneously, e-learning is moving beyond distance education to enterprise-wide services that support and extend the entire curricula and related institutional services. Your OCLC cooperative is involved in each of these endeavors.

Repositories

Universities have begun experimenting with “super” archives, or institutional repositories. These institutions are inviting their professors to load copies of their research papers, data sets and other works into the repositories. The objective is to gather as much of the intellectual output of an institution as possible in a searchable online collection. Libraries are being asked to lead these efforts.

Open Archives Initiative

Central to the development of the digital repositories is the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which began as a way to develop interoperability frameworks for linking e-print archives and which has evolved to increasing access to a range of digital materials by sharing metadata. The OAI established a metadata harvesting protocol that supports the interoperability of digital repositories whether they are institutional or discipline-or content-specific. An interview with one of the leaders of OAI, Dr. Herbert Van de Sompel, appears in this Newsletter.

OCLC is actively involved in the Open Archives Initiative. Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Research, serves on the OAI Steering Committee. OCLC research scientists have developed two software applications that provide an open systems framework for repositories. OAICat supports the OAI protocol for data storage, and OAI Harvester for harvesting. You can read in this Newsletter how these applications are being used in five emerging repositories.

At the same time, libraries have begun exploring ways to generate and publish metadata for digitized special collections such as archives and photo collections. How will these collections within their distributed repositories be accessible to knowledge seekers beyond institutional walls? How will institutions bring to the surface their unique objects that heretofore were below the discovery horizon? We know the answer—metadata.

The increase in digitized collections creates new needs to merge and share metadata from many different sources. Sharing metadata, of course, strikes a familiar chord for the OCLC cooperative—we’ve been doing it since 1971 and in the process have created WorldCat. While library metadata will continue to be shared through large centralized databases such as WorldCat for the foreseeable future, the Internet and new protocols being designed for it are making it much easier for institutions to search across multiple databases and retrieve metadata that can link the user directly to individual knowledge objects such as photos, documents and video.

A CONTENTdm image accessible from WorldCat in the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition Collection, University of Washington Libraries.

Linking special collections to WorldCat

OCLC has developed an exciting new tool that will allow libraries and other institutions to automatically add records of their unique digital collection materials to WorldCat. It will harvest metadata from a digitized CONTENTdm file and automatically add it to WorldCat.

CONTENTdm is software available from OCLC that enables libraries to create metadata and post Web exhibits of digital materials. You can license it for your own server or use a hosted solution from an OCLC server. There are now well over a million objects residing on CONTENTdm servers in nearly 100 libraries.

In this Newsletter you can read how the new link from CONTENTdm to WorldCat will enable libraries to expose their unique resources for information seekers around the world. Their special collections can now be shared in new ways that were not possible before. For the first time, library users will now have access to photographs, images and objects in special collections in addition to bibliographic information. WorldCat is indeed moving beyond bibliography and closer to our long-held dream of providing the information itself to users when and where they want it.

E-learning task force

This year, OCLC formed a Task Force on E-Learning to develop strategies that will enhance the ability of libraries to serve the academic community in the e-learning environment. The task force is composed of 11 librarians and faculty in instructional technology and curriculum. They are assessing the current state of e-learning on college campuses.

In September, the task force will issue a white paper on e-learning strategies for libraries. This document will help frame discussions as to what roles libraries and the OCLC cooperative might play in e-learning, a concept that today includes not only distance learning, but more traditional courses that have incorporated electronic elements into the traditional teaching and learning process.

We face some exciting prospects in this new environment of digital collections. Now is the time for the OCLC cooperative to focus on needed standards in metadata, interoperability, rights management and preservation. Cooperation, of course, will be more important than ever. Working together, we can help change how people conduct research, scholarship and education, and these changes will have far-reaching benefits for humanity in the years to come.