Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The report won’t be out until after the meeting this May, but Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections should be exciting and timely reading for everyone involved in supporting cultural heritage collections.

JISC’s Understanding the Costs of Digitisation (full report and briefing paper) offers an excellent summary of some of the core difficulties facing budgeting for digitization projects.

For those not already mired in digitization project operations, the graphed cost estimates for different projects on pages 44-47 are perhaps the best place to begin. In 3 of the 5 examples, overhead amounted to twice of the actual digitization costs.

To ensure we don’t suffer similar overages, we develop prototypes to estimate costs and associated requirements for projects. In doing so, we still encounter overhead - pushing technology is equal parts exciting and frustrating - but the overhead is manageable.

While the projects themselves have lower overhead through planning, there’s still a good deal of overhead needed to report on and explain project costs because digital projects aren’t comparable, unless designed specifically to be.

Digitisation projects are distinct, and it is not possible to provide a formula (or even approximate figures) to cost a project. [...] Attempting to compare these two projects quantitatively is unhelpful – the numbers could be generated, but without full consideration of the context, they would be meaningless. (page 7)

This document does not contain a formula into which you can input details of your collection and output the cost of the project – there is no standard digitisation project. (page 8 )

It’s nice to see the JISC Report explain what digital folks do on a regular basis - that digital projects are difficult to cost, and that the costs aren’t fungible. It’s also delightfully wonderful that it includes, “Plan the service, not just the project” (briefing paper, page 2). Service should be seen as a core component for any technical work. However in a strictly project-production model, it’s overhead and loss - something to be reduced and prevented. I don’t think anyone disagrees with the importance of service, but it does further complicate the cost model by mixing more discrete (at least on a single project basis) production costs with less quantifiable service costs.

The Pennsylvania State University Libraries seeks a Digital Collections Curator to play a key role in the further development of our electronic content stewardship and publishing programs. These programs will be developed through a strategic and dynamic partnership between the Penn State Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS). The Digital Collections Curator will lead the Libraries’ efforts to develop and plan user focused services that enable the effective creation, sharing, discovery, and use of digital content in support of research, teaching and learning. The Digital Collections Curator collaborates extensively with colleagues throughout the Libraries and ITS to achieve his or her objectives. The Curator will report to the Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communications who also oversees Digitization and Preservation, Scholarly Communications Services, and the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing. This is a tenure track appointment.

Responsibilities will include:

• Lead development of an inclusive, user-focused agenda for digital scholarly content stewardship.
• Investigate, recommend, and develop plans for user-focused and repository- based services to effectively manage the sustainable creation, collection and distribution of high-value digital scholarly content.
• Manage a broad set of existing digital collections and repository content, including: reformatted materials (images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, etc), publication related content (journals, conference proceedings, monographs, hybrid formats, post & pre-prints, working papers, etc), as well as the potential and emerging needs for data collections in a wide array of disciplines.
• Research and develop in-depth knowledge of new and emerging technologies, relevant national standards, and best practices, in order to assess and promote their integration into local operations as appropriate.
• Serve on standing working groups and committees related to web functionality and digital content creation and management.
• Communicate effectively with internal stakeholders in the areas of collections & public services, technical services, information technologies, and scholarly communications.
• Promote and report on Penn State’s activities through conference and workshop presentations, written publications
• Represent Penn State in relevant professional contexts and engage with national and consortial peers to identify and/or carry out mutually beneficial partnerships.

Requirements:

• Master’s degree in library and/or information science, or advanced degree in relevant academic field.
• Should have 3 years work related to the creation, management, and provision of electronic data resources in a higher education environment.
• Should demonstrate strong organizational and/or process management abilities.
• Should demonstrate familiarity with developing trends in higher education information management, including, but not limited to: Cyberinfrastructure development, data curation and preservation, electronic publishing, digital scholarship and non-traditional scholarly communications
• Ability to lead and work collaboratively in an evolving and decentralized environment.
• Commitment to user focused design, development, and service provision.
• Communication skills that will support work with both technology experts and novices.
• Facility with common standards and practices in contemporary digital library management. Experience with XSLT, Perl or other scripting languages, and/or experience with major repository platforms is desirable.

Environment:

As an outcome of joint strategic planning, the Penn State Libraries and Information Technology Services (ITS) are collaborating in the development of this Content Stewardship program to meet extant and emerging digital content and asset management needs in areas such as digital library collections, scholarly communications, electronic record archiving, and e-science/e-research. Building on existing services and infrastructure, this program will put in place a cohesive and extensible suite of data access, management, and preservation services that will support the creation and distribution of digital scholarship. Additionally, the Penn State Press and the Libraries jointly operate the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing to explore and incubate publishing services that support the Penn State community.

Penn State, a land-grant institution, is a member of the CIC (Big 10) academic consortium. The Penn State University Libraries currently rank 8th in North America among private and public research universities, based on Association for Research Libraries Investment Index. The Libraries hold membership in ARL, OCLC, CRL and the Digital Library Federation. Collections exceed 6.5 million volumes, including more than 68,000 current serial subscriptions.

The University Libraries are located at University Park and 23 other campuses throughout Pennsylvania, with approximately 6,000 faculty and 42,000 students at University Park, and more than 82,000 students system wide. The University Park campus is set in the State College metropolitan area, a university town located in the heart of central Pennsylvania. State College offers a vibrant community with outstanding recreational facilities, a low crime rate, and excellent public schools. The campus is within a half-day drive to Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City and Pittsburgh. For more information, please visit http://www.libraries.psu.edu and http://www.cbicc.org/

Application Instructions:

Send a letter of application, resume, and the names and contact information of three references to Search Committee, The Pennsylvania State University, Box DCC-PSUA, 511 Paterno Library, University Park, PA 16802, via email to lhrsearches@psulias.psu.edu, or fax to 814-863-5592. Review of applications will begin March 2, 2009 and continue until the position is filled.

Penn State is committed to affirmative action, equal opportunity, and the diversity of its workforce.

The New York Times has an article “Digital Archivists, Now in Demand” and it’s great to see the field recognized and growing! I’m not sure where they got the salary information though, but perhaps the field pays more in some areas than others. Regardless of the financial compensation, working with issues of digital preservation and with the actual materials to-be-digitized is incredibly rewarding and there’s always more to learn.

LOC Press Release:

The Library of Congress is among a dozen federal agencies launching an initiative to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Basing its efforts on a combination of collaborative research and combined experience, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative will address a variety of issues related to the complex activities involved in the digitization of cultural heritage items.

Two working groups have been formed, one addressing content that can be captured in still images, the other involved with content categorizing sound, video, or motion-picture film. The initiative includes a just-launched Web site, www.digitizationguidelines.gov.

The Federal Agencies Still Image Digitization Working Group will focus its efforts on content such as books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. Its members include the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Gallery of Art, the National Library of Medicine, the National Technical Information Service, the National Transportation Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Government Printing Office. An Advisory Board of technical experts from industry and academia will also contribute to the initiative.

The Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group, which will address standards and practices for sound, video, and motion picture film, includes the Defense Visual Information Directorate of the Department of Defense, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Voice of America.

The agencies began meeting in 2007 to identify common practices for digitizing cultural heritage materials in a sustainable way. Establishing guidelines is expected to increase the quality and consistency of digitized documents and media that are made available to the public, streamline workflows and reduce costs, promote the exchange of research, and encourage collaboration across agencies. The guidelines will also provide common benchmarks for digitization service providers and manufacturers.

The Web site currently features two documents developed by the Still Image Digitization Working Group that are open for comment until mid-November. The first proposes a minimal set of embedded TIFF metadata for use in historical and cultural heritage digital imaging. The second two-part document presents a taxonomy of digital image characteristics and provides corresponding metrics and criteria to describe and validate imaging performance and quality.

The Web site also provides a glossary of digitization terms and concepts, and presents digitization-related news and events on the subject from the participating agencies.

This collaborative effort initially formed under the auspices of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), a Library of Congress-led program initiated by Congress in December 2000 to develop a national strategy to collect and preserve digital content. For more information on NDIIPP visit www.digitalpreservation.gov.

The Florida Center for Library Automation is looking for a bright, energetic, technophile to work in the Digital Library Services group. The University of Florida Libraries, which includes UF’s Digital Library Center (us), works with the Florida Center for Library Automation. FCLA coordinates library technology for all of the State Universy Libraries. For those not from Florida, our universities are all of the publics with the word “University” in them, but the universities aren’t tied as one institution (like the University of California at…) so FCLA works with all of us (FGCU, FIU, FSU, UNF, FAMU, USF, FAU, UCF, UWF, NCF, UF). While we (we as in UF) don’t get to see the folks at FCLA nearly enough, we do get to see and hear from them fairly often and they’re great.

FCLA is in Gainesville, but not next to the UF campus (where we, the DLC are), so there are no traffic and no parking woes for FCLA, and they can have events like “Take Your Dog to Work Day“. The official job description is online here and more official details are below. The parts of FCLA that I find most exciting are the Florida Digital Archive (cutting edge awesomeness!); collaborating across so many institutions and with so many great people; working with FCLA; being in Gainesville; and working with UF in particular, of course. FCLA is also a technical unit playing with an implementing technology and so they get to play with, test, and implement really wonderful tools while working with all sorts of great people across the state.

FCLA is a center of the State University System of Florida which provides automation services to the libraries of eleven public universities.  Working at FCLA combines the challenges of library and information science with large scale data processing in a fully networked, web-based environment. Application areas they work in involve:

• training and user support of library staff
• e-resource licensing
• metadata
• structured and full-text search and retrieval
• XML technologies
• web services
• relational database management systems
• next-generation integrated library systems
• digital image, audio, and multimedia

FCLA is located in Gainesville Florida, consistently rated one of the best places to live in the United States, and administratively associated with the University of Florida.  We offer a casual work environment, ample free parking, flexible hours, and full State of Florida benefits.