 Welcome, everyone. I'm Sandra McIntyre. We're glad to have you here for our session today on a digital library for everyone designing for collaboration and innovation. We've got a number of presenters who will be doing different things with you today, quite a nice variety of things. And I'd like to take a moment for everyone to introduce him or herself before we get started. I'll start on Sandra McIntyre. I work for the Mountain West Digital Library, which is a program of the Utah Academic Library Consortium. Looks like this slide got messed up. And the Utah Academic Library Consortium is a consortial effort among Utah, Nevada, and Idaho academic libraries. And the Mountain West Digital Library is one of its signature programs. And we'll learn more about Mountain West Digital Library later. And next, my name is Cheryl Walters. I'm head of digital initiatives at Utah State University. And let me just say that for those of us who came from the West Coast this morning, seven o'clock came awful early. Yeah, I'm super tired. My name's Nate Hill. I'm here from San Jose. I'm a web librarian at the San Jose Public Library. Yeah. Michael Lascaris. I am senior manager for web initiatives for the New York Public Library. And I'll say that there are lots of people at NYPL working on different aspects of this. I'm going to stay to the domain that I am familiar with, which is audience and user experience and delivery of materials. That's my standard disclaimer. Thank you. Hi, I'm Toby Greenwald. I'm the virtual services coordinator for the Stokey Public Library. We're just north of Chicago. And I think, you know, in the public library world, this is a concept that's not on a lot of people's radar. But I think for it to work, it's going to require a much greater critical mass. And so I'm hoping to, you know, get what I can here and spread it out to the masses. Hi, I'm Jefferson Bailey, formerly digital projects coordinator, Brooklyn Public Library, and recently started at Library of Commerce. Great. Thanks everyone. So many of us have just met each other in person for the first time today, although a number of us have known each other online. And of course, we've worked together online to plan this variety of things for you today. So we're going to start out with just a few slides setting context about a digital library for everyone. What does this mean? So I've headed what are some of the questions that it raises? What's the potential? And then Cheryl, Walters and I will do a presentation about a certain case study, the Mountain West Digital Libraries experience over the last 10 years, as we look at what it means to design for the content part of collaborative efforts. And some of our ideas about what has worked and maybe what still needs to work. And then Nate Hill will be giving a presentation on what a national digital library means for public libraries, giving that perspective. And he'll take us into some focus questions that we're offering today where the panel will reflect on some things that we think are interesting to reflect on. And then we invite your participation as well in answering, helping us to answer some of those questions. So a digital library for everyone. Well, we have a lot of large scale national collaborations that are underway, some very significant ones. And we are all starting to pay a lot of attention to those, wondering what it means for us and what we need to do as we scale up and get bigger and bigger. Many of you in the room have been involved in increasingly larger scale collaborations as you've worked on regional digital libraries or perhaps discipline specific digital libraries. But now we're starting to talk at a national level. And what does that mean and what is the potential for it? So some of the things that we've pulled out as maybe being part of that potential for discussion today are, first of all, of course, the idea of free and open access. We want to deliver that as librarians. What does that mean to give full access to as many people as possible? And how are they going to want to receive that access? What are they going to want to do with it? So integrated discovery becomes a big part of this. How do we take that information overload potential problem and turn it into something that's actually useful for people through giving them really good discovery tools? What do we do to preserve that cultural heritage for a lot longer time? We're seeing a lot of concern over disappearing digital resources. What can we do together at a national level on a preservation basis? And then how do we accommodate the diversity? The diversity of the resources themselves, all the formats, all the different kinds of content, subject matter, vocabularies that are involved. But also how do we deal with the diversity of the libraries, archives, and other memory institutions that are involved in coming together with their different needs, different perspectives on the materials. And how do we accommodate that diversity to make the richest environment possible? How do we make sure that things are curated with some of the issues that David Weinberger brought up earlier so that we're offering resources in a way that's not confusing to people so they know what we think of them or what they can think of or what they can do with them? How do we plan for better interaction for people with the resources? What are people going to want to do? Remix, reuse, repurpose? How is that going to work? And then what kind of community are we building out of this? What sort of culture are we creating among ourselves as we do these common efforts and then more broadly among all of our different audiences? So there are two big initiatives that are going on. One of them is Hottie Trust. The other one you heard a lot about this morning was DPLA. Can I just see a show of hands? Are there Hottie Trust members in the room? Okay. And how many people are interested in participating with DPLA? Wow, that's great. That's great. And some of you raised your hands for both efforts. That's good. Well, for those few of you that don't know what Hottie Trust is, it's an international community of research libraries that are committed to the long-term curation and availability of the cultural record. And we have almost 10 million volumes in that library. And we've made progress over several years. So there is a corpus of materials out there for people to use. On the other hand, we have DPLA, which is just beginning, but there are some similarities between the two efforts. DPLA is an ambitious project to realize the great potential of the internet for the advancement of sharing information. So those are the two efforts that we have in mind as we're giving our presentation this morning about collaboration. So our focus today is going to be that we in the digital library community have learned a lot about collaboration and innovation in this last decade. We've been building increasingly larger-scale digital libraries. And we'll be telling you a little bit about our own collaborative, the Mountain West Digital Library. But now we're wondering, what can we now apply from what we've learned over the last 10 years to the task at a national level? And as we were tossing ideas around for how to give what we should cover in this presentation, it occurred to us that there are actually two aspects of digital collaboration. And one is the back end, where you're bringing diverse partners and content to the collaborative stewardship. So this is building the content and then you have the front end, which is redesigning the tools and interfaces to meet the diverse needs of a broader audience. Sandra and I are going to be focusing more on the back end and Nate and his crew are going to be focusing a little more on the front end in our talks this morning. So as we look for designing for content collaboration and take a look at this case study of MWDL, we're looking at our search portal that we've created. It's a central search portal to digital resources from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and actually we've been recently adding a large number of government agencies at all levels, municipal, county, service districts, as well as state in the Mountain West. We've got a fairly large search portal at this point, 350 collections, 55 partnering organizations, hosted on 18 regional hosting hubs and a total of 600,000 records. And just a quick little bit about us. We had some good drivers for collaboration. It was kind of collaborate or die in the Mountain West. We are very isolated from both coasts. We have a lot of people who are, you know, hundreds of miles from their next friendly face and so working together became something we really wanted to do. Had a lot of economic drivers, as I'm sure many other regions of the country have had for collaborating and squeezing the most we can out of scarce state dollars in our states. We realized quickly that a lot of us in our academic libraries were in the same boat and that we were all facing the same training challenges and the same technology infrastructure challenges. Fortunately, many of us in the academic world in the Mountain West had had a 30 plus year history of collaborating via the Utah Academic Library Consortium which represents libraries not only in Utah but also in Nevada and Southern Idaho. And we were able to leverage that structure, that support, that collegiality to get started working together and to find ways to work across those many miles in lonely Utah. We've come up with something that I think is actually pretty astonishing in its diversity and I know a lot of what you are working with, many of you, is you're starting to feel that too. Wow, it's amazing the different kinds of partners we're working with and that just keeps getting more various. So we have a variety of different partners. We also have a variety of different formats and we need to be able to represent those and think of what people might want to do with those and how the metadata accommodates a lot of interoperability among very different formats from different kinds of uses. So this diversity in our collaboration leads us to have to think a lot about how are we going to manage that and how do we make sure everyone's at the table and all of those resources are useful to people. And we want to talk a little bit more about some of the aspects of what we've ended up doing to manage that and then a couple of questions about where we've seen that we need to maybe do some new things in our second decade. So just in brief, before we go into a few more of the details, we have managed it through regional hubs to provide services to smaller cultural heritage institutions rather than trying to have it all be centrally managed. We have created a centralized harvester and search interface to optimize the aggregation of all of that into one place that's convenient for users. We have really focused on governance that allows local ownership and central discovery. We have developed symbiotic partnerships with different funding agencies. We've made clear roles, responsibilities and pricing and we've right-sized with working groups to get it all done. So first, here's a little graphic representing our distributed network. We've got 18 now different regional hubs representing a wide number of repository types. We've got Content DM and B-Press and Archivalware and a lot of homegrown systems that had to make up their own O.A.I. stream and stuff like that. So we have a real variety of hosting hubs spread around our region so that they can then in turn turn around and provide hosting services and digitization services to smaller cultural heritage institutions, libraries, archives, historical societies, etc. The hubs of these regional hubs have taken on a lot of the burden recently in conducting the training and the technical support for those smaller organizations and that's more about that in a minute. The hubs do the hosting. Many of them provide digitization services. They have a fee that they charge to the smaller partners for those services. They can also contract to do metadata assignment or parts of the metadata assignment. We usually like local partners to be really involved in their metadata but there may be technical metadata or other kinds of customized subject assignments that can be done by the folks at the regional hosting hub and they provide the training and technical support. Despite that distributed network which we view as a real strength being able to spread it out, have it be scalable and flexible we still of course need to aggregate all the information into a central index and we're really pleased in recent months to have been able to go live with Ex Libris Primo as our integrated discovery layer and it seems to be performing pretty well for us now. Very robust harvesting really quick about going out and getting all the information good faceting of results and did you mean suggestions for users but still when people come into our index and discover things that they want the link goes back out to the regional hosting hub so the resources are actually hosted close to home not in a central location just the metadata is harvested centrally and I'm sure that's a model that's common for some organizations other than ours. So this leads to some governance implications for us we like the collections to remain really owned at the local level we want the people who were involved in collecting the photographs or who found the maps in some back office at the government offices to be the ones to work with local folks to assign metadata we want those people to decide legal and copyright issues and to be sure to curate the collections through their lifetime so that also gives us real advantages in terms of buy-in at the local level we brand all the local resources with the contributing partners header and footer and we make sure that we have policies that are member driven through our committee of hub representatives and anyone else who wants to be on it from our partner organizations so this has led to kind of a balance balancing act between management, distributed management and a centralized management and we go back and forth about where the right balance is there and striking that right balance can be difficult at times but we like to think that it's an ongoing question that we ask what should be centralized, some things you want to have centralized for efficiency reasons and other reasons but a lot of things I think need to stay distributed and I think that's been one of the strengths of our collaborative we've maintained buy-in from a lot of people being involved at a more local level Okay, another kind of hallmark of our consortium is that we've sought a variety of funding mechanisms and some of these have been, we've developed symbiotic relationships to existing funding sources like LSTA and most of the states, well I think all of them have state historical records advisory boards well we partnered with ours and now when they go out and they make a pitch with all the little cultural heritage institutions across the state they recommend that instead of using grant money to purchase their own equipment that they come instead to the regional hubs and they pay us to do the digitization for them so it has been really beneficial to develop those relationships Also we found it really critical to, as we got larger that we needed to start to write things down and be more formal about roles and responsibilities, who is expected to do what and we also found it critical to develop a price list because knowing what each hub is going to charge and that they're not going to be undercutting each other and that there is this predictable set of prices allows small institutions who are seeking grants to write the grant up easily without contacting a regional hub to say well what would you charge me if you do X for me and then a third critical thing that we did that really has helped us to share our metadata better and create a better interface with facets and other value added aspects to it has been the creation of best practices this way we know that when a person is using the creator field we're all using it for the same thing and that we can build predictable search engines that will give consistent results across many collection partners and collections So early on when we were small we used to all get together and make decisions talk things out and decide what we were going to do but as we grew bigger and this is going to be a big issue with DPLA and Hottie Trust we discovered that's not very efficient and so we spun off these working groups and you'll see that this is a strategy that Hottie Trust and DPLA are already using that people with expertise or interest in a certain area will participate in a working group that focuses on that and they can get a lot of work done offline so to speak and then report back to the entire committee so you can have multiple initiatives going on at one time and it really helps move the group forward some of the working groups that we've had have been metadata outreach, portal design, web 2.0 tools training and digital preservation but as we move on to the national level we have some recommendations based on our experiences in a smaller venue and that is try to keep ownership at the local level to spell it all out on paper to try to tie in with existing structures so that you're not duplicating efforts and then make conscious decisions about where it's appropriate and most efficient to centralize versus decentralize and then right size the work team by breaking it up into appropriate groups and create a large umbrella with technology structure you don't want everybody running around creating maybe an individual digital preservation system you know let's economize and build a big one that people can contribute to and this is something that Hottie Trust has already done so we're not finished we've just finished up our first 10 years and now we're moving into the next 10 years so we have new issues we're exploring we're looking to meet the needs of our partners across the life cycle of resources we used to focus on just getting the stuff together but now we're starting to plan for data curation and long term preservation and we're also interested in joining with other collaboratives like the Northwest Digital Archive in Washington and we're interested in collaboratively developing digital collections so as an example we have a Japanese relocation center in Utah called it's located in Delta and there are a lot of historical documents as a result in Utah that pertain to this Japanese-American relocation center that occurred during World War II so instead of each each entity having their own little collection about these resources and everyone having to go to Place A, Place B, Place C now they can come to the Mountainous Digital Library and we're hoping to build a topical search that'll say Topes, Japanese-American Relocation Center and we'll just click on that and it will seamlessly bring all those resources together into one corpus and then finally we want to make sure we're serving diverse user groups as we add more institutions to our group they're bringing in different needs and we need to make sure we're meeting all those needs and we want to explore collaborative training in digital collection management so that everybody knows how to do their jobs and do it well so at this point we're going to turn the conversation over to Nate and he's going to talk about what a national digital library means for public libraries so I have to ask to start things off other than the panelists that we've got over here is there anybody from public libraries in this room raise your hand come on yes alright, that's great it's really fun to be in a different kind of room and talking to a different group of people about all of this stuff I'm excited to turn this into a conversation and I want feedback and I want you guys to be talking to me about all of this I'm going to run through a few different things I'm going to talk a little bit about what I think the future of public libraries is and should be I'm going to talk a little bit about user generated content and how I'd like to see that work with the DPLA and I'm going to talk a little bit about what perhaps a physical footprint for the DPLA might be because I don't believe that for public libraries it's really good enough for it to simply exist as like a big web thingy so moving along just a little observation about what the internet has done to things in libraries libraries traditionally are these kind of read-only facilities they're a place where you go to consume knowledge you would go and you can access books and you can read them there you can get your music you can get your movies, whatever but it's always a one-way relationship with certain exceptions but that's basically the model that we've always worked on I would say that that's not good enough anymore and I think that we're really only doing half of what we could be doing in public libraries so there's a great opportunity and this great opportunity comes at the same time that all of our content is going digital so it's interesting to see that now since the Amazon Kindle deal e-book circulation has gone up like 250% or something like that at my library but at the same time the door count is as crazy as ever so what is up with that what is up with the fact that all of our content is going digital we're talking about digital public libraries of America yet these buildings are jammed with people they're doing all kinds of different things in there and so I think that what we have to realize is that libraries are about more than just the consumption and collection of knowledge that's in them it's about the other pieces it's about the opportunity to produce knowledge in there as well so the most obvious example of that that you'll see in every single public library is a kids craft program that always happens a lot of people are going and turning them into flicker slideshows and stuff like that now but why does it stop with kids why when we have this sort of networked environment when it's just as easy to write to a blog or anything like that why do we leave it there why is it that my friends kid who loves the internet doesn't know how to use something like Photoshop what's up with that there's an opportunity here for libraries to move into a different space and so along comes the DPLA which I think is just this wonderful huge ambitious project but it's important to me as a public librarian that we steer it in a direction that makes sense for our users I think about this stuff more at the app level more at the user interface level so I'm not going to be the guy who's going to provide the best argument for distributed versus centralized or whatever what I think about is my end users is the people who come into the library and what could this tool be that would be helpful to them how could it change the way that they learn the way that they interact with each other with information in general where is the added value for them so one of the ways to kind of like back up and look at libraries is to sort of categorize things and you can say that indeed every library in some way has a collection associated with it I don't think anybody would argue with that they're also about the conversations that go on between people in there and the connections that you draw between different objects that are in there and finally it's about context it's about librarians helping you figure out where this stuff fits into your life what makes sense, what's good, what's bad and all these things come together to form community is everybody with me so far cool, good so there was this great moment at that DPLA plenary meeting a couple weeks ago the whole thing was it was very historic and deep, it was really deep this quote here it's to facilitate the discovery and exposure of digital content for permanent open public access for the enhancement of knowledge and community wow, that's huge but I just loved that the director of the Los Angeles Public Library got up in the middle of this thing and just kind of raised his hand and said what's in it for the kids and yeah, I mean the guy is totally right on these are the people who come every day after school they're working on their projects I'm hanging out with them and dealing with their issues so if we're starting to think about what the DPLA could really be about apps that would be built on all of this those are users that you really have to consider and I would argue that if we don't somehow incorporate user generated content into this thing we lose the sort of context that makes these people interested in it and it's interesting because this is going to get at some of the stuff that David was talking about earlier with inclusion and the content you know, once we hit a point where my kids at the library are uploading videos of whatever their library activity was and relating it to trusted library content what does that mean for the academic folks who are using the same stuff out there you need to have a way to filter down on that stuff but at the end of the day we've got the five elements that have been agreed upon with the DPLA code, it's about metadata content, tools and services in community but I want to see all of that stuff channeled back around to create apps that inspire creativity in the community so that people can contribute back and it can again be about the production of knowledge, not just the consumption of knowledge in the library so I'm going to go to sort of a use case study here this is a super popular program at the San Jose Public Library it's the battle of the bands these kids love it like they wait all year for it and come out and basically they rock out so it's interesting that this is like one of the most popular things that goes on at the public library and it would almost be easy to dismiss it as whatever it's just kids rocking out but no, this is an important moment in their lives and it gives them an opportunity to relate the production of what they're doing to all of the other information that the library has accessible so there are other points, so this is the performance aspect but think of all the other sort of touch points along the way that the library could assist with this and start to imagine where the DPLA might come into this my buddy up the way works at the East Palo Alto Library where he got a grant to start lending guitars it's amazing I don't know how he ever got a picture of them on the wall because they're never there they're always checked out but what if you took the battle of the bands and then you took it to the point we're going to provide the tools by which you do this it's sort of like at the Berkeley Public Library they're lending out power tools you can actually borrow things like that or if you want to get digital with it there are libraries that are lending out digital cameras and whatnot so that's one other place that you could do it but what if we start to think about it you create with the guitar, right? then you have your performance moment and I know that Toby actually has an instance of this because at his library they have a media lab and there's audio production equipment another opportunity for the library to assist in the creative process and then of course you can share it to the web but then this last step is where I sort of start to get excited about the DPLA and this gets into the curating that David was talking about earlier as well and actually I am kind of talking about old school curating not some of the deeper stuff he was talking about so let me skip ahead so alright so here's these same kids in the bottom here playing their show say they've uploaded their video to the DPLA and they realized that they're kind of into the goth thing so they discovered a couple of old records that sort of makes sense to their tastes, their music, right? they find an old cure record they find a Susie and the Banshee's record but then because they're able to build these collections inside of the app they can start to take their tastes and relate to the other library quality works as we were saying earlier so I mean I'm remembering when I was a kid and there was a song by the cure called Killing in Arab which was a really controversial song but it's because nobody really knew that it was actually about the stranger and it was what motivated me to actually read that book in the first place and that's kind of how kids' brains work, right? You take these strange pathways to understanding what interests you in the example, in the other example you've got Susie and the Banshee's who did her make-up very much like Cleopatra and so it could be an easy in-road to becoming interested in ancient Egyptian culture so I think that there's a great opportunity with this sort of giant cultural heritage collection to build apps that really engage people through learning through curation I'm just going to show a couple of ones that I thought were super awesome from the meeting the other day. Extermurus is a tool that does a lot of that and also David didn't even talk about shelf life which is a really cool app that he developed with his team over at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab so finally as I'm talking about all of this stuff with production with content creation I really do believe that there needs to be some kind of more serious framework for actually doing this on a regular basis in public libraries we have these disparate efforts there are all these cool little media labs and things like that popping up all over the place but we're talking about the network effect we're talking about the age in which all these things need to be connected in another way I've been working with oh I missed a slide, super important you have to make it fun whatever apps are built on this thing if it is not entertaining in some way ain't nobody going to use it and I really hope people are thinking about that there's a tendency to get kind of dry and scholarly about this stuff I'm going to make no friends saying things like that anyways, you know what I mean so getting back to the idea of a space in which these activities happen I was working with some architects Nolan Tam in Berkeley and friend Sam from the one laptop per child project on pulling together a modular set of architecture that can support each of these different types of activities there's something more sense as I kind of just show you that probably won't show up very well so the idea is that you can break down the production of knowledge into these 10 to 11 categories examples being say you wanted a scanning unit a particular scanning need in your library then you would be able to take from these designs pull that in to your library program all of the stuff is modular it's an open source architecture it's printable at your local fab lab and every single piece is built from a series of I think it's 10 pieces that we've got there based on a Penrose tile design so you can have all of these different chunks and modules operating at different libraries across the country and they can all contribute back to one source so using the example of the battle of the bands I picked out a couple of the modules that would make the most sense you'd need an audio remix and record set up you would need a layout setup and you might need a curation setup each of these things can scale depending on what your budget is how much space you have it could be built from plate glass or it could be built from cardboard it just depends on what your budget is and so right now we're in the process of developing this further what I'm showing you is pretty pictures because we haven't taken it to the point of doing construction experiments figuring out all of the connections and all of the fun little details with this but it's coming so that's my little piece on the future of public libraries and really knowledge production in public libraries and how that's part of what the DPLA needs to do I think that is it so let's move on and get our panelists up here okay whoa the first question we have here is for right arrow do it okay, I got it for Sandra and the question is how does a national digital library benefit diverse content partners what is their motivation to contribute content yeah and I think we'll just go off of this mic now rather than my life let's get off and then I'd love to hear from others too about this you know, we felt like we wanted to talk a little bit about why different partners would get involved and what's in it for them and how do we keep that diversity of different organizations being involved in bringing that wide variety content DPLA's got to think about that Hottie Trust has got to think about that what's in it for the content partners what's their motivation a lot of people frankly in the library world are kind of used to making their reputation on this is my special collection and I'd like to be known for our special collection and our curation efforts and we'd like people to come to us to get it so do you work with saying well you'll be more famous by having your materials be accessible through DPLA and Hottie Trust people can see what you've done and as long as we keep it branded that it was your work that put it up does that work to motivate people are some people also maybe motivated by their interest in their users being able to experience the materials so there's this kind of quid pro quo I'll share my materials if you share your materials and we'll all have a richer experience for all of our audiences so that kind of collaboration comes about too but what else can we do to motivate people to actually go to the trouble I mean it takes some trouble to be interoperable in a DPLA in Hottie Trust it takes some effort to take your collections and share them and maybe have to change a lot of metadata fields or do some complicated cross walks to make sure that they happen and what is motivating people does some of you have some ideas about how that works how have you motivated people to make supportive efforts that you've worked in to bring that content to the table that original primary source content is of course mostly what I'm talking about now ideas yeah there's a microphone right here this is being recorded yeah here I'll take the microphone too here you go is it working no here this will work just use this one nice the motivation that occurred to me was a raised profile I mean we know that so much content is siloed even when it's all on the web and at least theoretically equally discoverable by Google in practice that doesn't really happen people have their one place that they go so I mean this is not exactly on motivation but a lack of demotivation for content contributors would be I think it's important for that content to remain branded by that library or content provider usually Europeana actually does a really good job of this where they sort of make it clear it's all sort of copies of it in Europeana but then you know where that thing came from and you can click through to their site I think so so that great anybody did you have a question as well that's fairly similar in some ways that connection and the interoperability what jumped to my mind was when you mentioned the Topaz relocation camp we just mounted at I'm an archivist at UMass Boston a set of oral history interviews by a professor at UMass who interviewed people who survived those camps you know who are still around and who have recorded their stories so to pull those together is the motivation you know to have it all in one universe for then you know fasting and filtering and operating upon what I don't understand which maybe at the end of these two days I'll understand more is you know the direction of that kind of interoperability what it means in terms of searching of the DPLA and also the linked open data concept you know the more dynamic or you know what really needs to be repository together and what how dynamic we can be about making those connections but the motivation then is the pulling things together anybody want to speak to that yeah I'm going to give this to you I think there are two things that people don't want anymore even in the Ivy League where I live first of all everybody understands nobody's got everything even on one topic so the way you get everything is you put it online and it's interoperable so nobody wants to be in the position of having only some and nobody wants to be in the position that's not out there it used to be that you know the important thing was the gatekeeper you can't come and look because you are not one of the anointed ones but now it's if you still have that and that generation really has passed I think even in the really stuffy institutions and there's a reason they call us the ancient eight you know the idea that your stuff will be the stuff that nobody sees you don't want to be there or the stuff that nobody uses that's even worse thank you anything else or should we hop on to the next question looks like we're good okay okay this one is coming at Michael when the target demographic is everyone rather than a specific user group how can we design services for the range of needs that they have okay this question came up and this is a question that I deal a lot with my previous title at NYPL was digital user analysts so I spent a lot of time thinking about audiences and I think NYPL is a pretty good proxy for everyone because we're one of the few institutions in the world if not the only that has you know sort of world scale neighborhood branch library system that lends as well as for research libraries we literally have an audience that goes from the homeless and the incarcerated through to PhD researchers and the wealthiest people in New York City and everyone in between so of course you look at that spread and you think that's everyone but in fact it's not everyone it breaks itself down into a series of uses it's a series of specifics it's a series of things that you can get your head around and it brings up a lot of different approaches one approach is to identify segments within that use any means necessary surveys analytics listening to social networks to find out where people are I made a partial list and I won't read all of these but these are some of the segments that we have identified at NYPL professional researchers academic scientists and business researchers authors, editors, journalists and other writers visual artists, performing artists business users, entrepreneurs job seekers, employers those seeking financial advice readers for pleasure genealogists, enthusiast amateurs huge huge audience educators, students at all levels educators at all levels parents of children space users people who just come in to use the building people who came in to use the bathroom people who came in to use the computers people who came in for a class for a program attendees of classes special needs audiences those without computers tourists, the list goes on so there are things that you can get your hands around but I think the important understanding is that just as the ideal of DPLA or a similar effort is to include all of the materials and let the filters evolve really in hearing David Weinberger's intro I thought about what is everything everything is the ideal but it's not really going to be everything it's everything we can get our hands on which is probably going to be a very finite slice of everything and similarly everybody is going to be a finite slice of everybody so it's going to be a dance it's going to be back and forth knowing about the people who are there using but keeping in mind sorry is that Joy's law that all of the smartest people work for someone else there's something similar in libraries all of the best patrons are going to be going somewhere else so we need to think about that and realize that we know who's there but also cognizant of who are we leaving out that's really the big question that should be asked frequently, often, constantly did we miss anybody who are we leaving out we think we've got everybody and everybody is sort of everybody we're talking to but the reality is it's much bigger I could ramble on at this for some length so I think I'll open it up to any other questions that's wonderful segmenting I think is a really smart way of putting it does anybody have anything they want to say to that? let me bring a microphone too I'm like double miced here I really don't need that this is more of a comment rather than a magic bullet kind of answer but listening to Nate and then to you Michael I keep wondering about how to cultivate DPLA as a place there's this idea of library as a place how can you make a destination and sort of bring in sort of theoretical concepts based on that idea to make it inclusive and to get it to be a place where kids will want to go and I don't know if user generated content is the avenue towards that but it might be a start I think that's what I was getting at when I was saying make it fun basically you have to make whether a place is on the web or a place is a physical space it's a user experience question it's a matter of turning it into a desirable place and I think that is pretty much on everybody's radar looks like Toby wants to talk about that were you was that done with your thought? yeah that's something we look at with our digital media lab in terms of creating spaces for people to create content one of the places we look at for inspiration is the U Media Lab at Chicago Public Library which is of course one of the largest examples of these sort of spaces as well as being the most well funded one of the things that we're concerned with in creating kind of a social environment for people is how do you get people to be that first pioneer there's always a statement against putting your stuff out there and no one responding you acknowledge that 99% of the people on the web are never going to respond but they may actually end up seeing it one of the things U Media has done and again thanks to having the funding to do this is they hired mentors people who are skilled graphic designers or people who have our recording artists or filmmakers or things like this who go and respond to everything that's put out there this almost instant level of feedback and that's something that we may need to look at in terms of creating this interactive space is how do we how do we increase the reaction time how do we justify how do we make people feel justified in putting their making their content available through her platform anybody else on yeah came in a bit late I'm not sure if it was covered but one of the things I find interesting about this in your comment about segmentation is that if we are aiming for something that's an infrastructure that's networked and potentially multi-site if you recognize you have multiple segments of your audience hopefully you'll know you've succeeded with your network architecture if you can also easily segment the services and we're already starting to see that I think with some of the large digital collections out there I mean books that Google scans they're available through Google Books they're available through Hathi Trusts they're available through on the online books page each of those three I mean it's a fairly general purpose collection offers a somewhat slightly different experience of navigating these things which some some users may prefer over others depending on what they're interested in but you can also you've also seen collections on specific topics of interest which are obviously pulling off of that Google Books corpus for example or other things like that so I'm hoping that you know if it succeeds we'll start making it easy so people can share the common information and build audience targeted services toward those yeah I think segmentation of the audiences is sort of one approach but there's the other approach which is build the services with in David's words the dumbest architecture possible because that becomes a the most flexible and letting the audiences find the services that's kind of a different approach you know it's kind of occurred to me that over the years he mentioned SGML and that so many of the the big hits so many of the networks that have succeeded have been simplifications of previous complicated networks. SGML was argued for years and then Tim Berners-Lee sort of based HTML on a very small slice of SGML and the world changed so there's kind of that approach which is build the network first and let the audience find if I could just two seconds going back to the question about physical libraries when I approached this I wrote down my notes and I started writing more questions and my next three questions were is there a distinction is the distinction between digital and physical important in a national digital library what are the boundaries of the library space does the boundary of the institution have meaning anymore I think it does topic for another time and that idea also how loyal are the patrons which I think is a really overlooked metric is do you have an audience that shows up every day or do they show up once a year and I've noticed this is one of the fundamental differences between for example museum websites and library websites libraries have enormously emotionally invested loyal audiences and that's a key distinction and museums tend to be special events they tend to be I'm going to visit them met once and libraries my typical patron shows up at least once a week and if you make one change on the library website you get 150 emails wouldn't know anything about that okay I'm going to move on to the next question here for Jefferson how do we not only maintain but actually improve the integrity and quality of digital resources and online services across many diverse memory institutions it's a mouthful yes so I guess there are two pieces to it integrity and quality integrity generally being the responsibility of the data creator and data providers quality is more a determination of the data user so when we're talking about integrity we're talking about structural integrity which is file format relational integrity generally metadata and ongoing integrity which is preservation so we've been digitizing cultural heritage collections which is more the perspective I'm coming from for many years there's tons of stuff out there but I think a lot of us acknowledge that it's often institutionally contained idiosyncratically described and adequately preserved and so I think it's these last two areas generally metadata and especially digital preservation where big-tent projects and collaborative initiatives have a really good opportunity to engage content creators and content digitizers in a way that ensures integrity so we've talked about metadata in the crosswalks and I think that collaborative projects definitely offer a lot of potential there for getting smaller institutions up to speed and metadata standards but I think they also have excellent potential for digital preservation initiatives and something like DPLA can really make a big difference for smaller institutions in the digital preservation realm so ideas of how they could do that they could encourage and support collaborative or consortial digital preservation networks be it shared storage or locks networks they could offer repository services develop open source tools for authentication and validation or even just provide consulting about cloud computing and I think the NWDL and the regional hubs had some really good ideas around this so that's integrity and then quality we've talked about linked open data and interoperability and how these increase accessibility and nothing really ensures quality like use but talking about availability it's sometimes easy to overlook the existing contextualizations of digital assets within their current environments so when we're aggregating data we're sometimes just aggregating data and not necessarily aggregating the curation that has already been done so I think big tent projects can really support educational or curricular programming that's already been built upon special collections and it can really support a lot of sort of the contextual detail that's been provided already so what they need to do to do that and I'm not really sure I have the answer to this is develop ways to mine the tacit knowledge that exists from content stewards and recreate it in a new environment and I think that's both technical problem also a problem of epistemology essentially and the idea is that we often talk about digital objects being in silos but I think that we're not just trying to pull from silos, we're also trying to pull the programming and the curricular initiatives and the education programs that have been built on those collections too so what are some examples of that BPL had a great one called Brooklyn Connections which essentially worked to tie students and teachers to primary source archival materials and a lot of libraries have very similar things and I think BPL are big collaborative efforts, have a chance to sort of scale up successful local projects and then there's other projects the Library of Congress and Internet Archive do K through 12 web archiving projects which is obviously a national initiative already but something like BPL has the opportunity to sort of provide another means of dissemination so ensuring quality is not just ensuring the accessibility and use of the asset but also ensuring that what has already been built upon that asset is also harvested so that's my spiel any other ideas? Thoughts anybody? It's because you nailed it you guys Well there are lots of free online tools out there for example the Teaching with Primary Sources program that Library of Congress has come up with that teachers can use to help educate students about how to use primary sources and it provides a very simple tool for harvesting the resources, putting them parking them in this file and then adding descriptive material to it so that a teacher for example could just be building this repertoire of digital objects that she can then use in her teaching so that's teaching with primary sources that's TPS and you can get information about that at the Library of Congress website and then some institutions have developed pretty sophisticated tools for using primary sources that have been digitized and one of them is the one that Utah State University has created called Instructional Architect and they go around the state and they teach teachers how to use this to build websites of resources that their students can then use so you can just build that into a learning object or just use it to enhance your curriculum just with that teaching with primary resources thing I want to bring it back around to the addition of user-generated content again because I think of one lesson that my wife does, she's a high school history teacher and with an interest in art history and there's a lesson that she does in which she's trying to show how Japanese prints have influenced impressionism and to take and build a collection of all these things that can be looked at together is incredibly useful but then to actually take it the next step and have a student create a work of art of their own and add it to that collection and see how that reflects everything that's going on in there it's just this really exciting way of engaging past this long for you I just wanted to add a quick comment that I was just really intrigued with puzzling through some of the things that David Weinberger was saying this morning about we don't need to be gatekeepers and holding back on resources that there are ways to help people with the filtering and help people to learn to interpret stuff so I'm just really intrigued to think about what that means as we start scaling up with just tons and tons of stuff and is my sort of instinctive anxiety about oh my gosh there's going to be a lot of junk in there is that just something that we're going to learn to deal with and that's one of the new great challenges and great opportunities that this all provides totally before I move to the next question does anybody have anything they want to jump in and say onward for Sandra opportunities are emerging for the Big Tent Portals Repositories to present and even construct knowledge that were not available when the content was institution or domain specific yeah and I think we probably already have dealt with this but I'd love to hear people's ideas you know we we're starting to notice even at the regional level that we're working with the Mount West Digital Library that the information and not it seems different when you start juxtaposing it with things that are really different diversity brings about new thought processes new interactions with material you know one example that Cheryl and I were talking about earlier is in our part of the dry dry dry west range management issues carry a lot of emotional and political weight with people we don't have a lot of water in Utah so how people choose to run cattle and sheep on our public lands makes a big difference well you get a whole different set of accabularies when you look at documents coming out of Utah State's University Range Management Program from what you get coming out of different political offices that are seeking to expand the use you know expand mining and other uses on these lands from a lot we have a large number of environmental organizations in Utah who are looking to diminish some of those destructive uses water plays into this all kinds of things start coming to play when you put all those resources together you start being able to compare them contrast them see the differences and hopefully come up with new knowledge about them that wasn't available when all of it was in different silos so any thoughts on that coming out of the earlier earlier talk today or ideas on that more thoughts okay we'll move on to the next one for Cheryl can or should one digital library do it all do we need both a half a trust a digital public library of America why or why not I love this question I really do you know when I first started hearing about DPLA I thought why do we need another national digital library initiative because you know Hottie trust was already underway but when I started to read a little more about what DPLA was doing and then I went back and I compared it to what Hottie trust is doing and it makes sense to me to have two different initiatives because you're serving different needs and the kinds of activities that Nate is talking about reuse remix and so forth they're different from the kinds of needs that Hottie trust is trying to serve where it's important to us to distinguish scholarly resources distinguished between different editions of a given work for example and it's important for us to preserve these things that have the seminal works that have been around a long time so the emphasis in Hottie trust is a lot on the preservation and the curation aspects of digital objects and less a little less on the reuse and remix so I think they're approaching resources from different perspectives but I'm really interested in hearing what the rest of you think because you could get some kind of emotional arguments and pitting these two things against each other but I think rather that they can complement each other so what do the rest of you think let me bring a microphone back to you man thanks yeah I think that makes a lot of sense what you said and I think they could ultimately meet in the middle Hottie trust and DPLA so coming from two different directions of focus and of use cases but I think they could meet up so I hope both organizations just stay open to meeting up which also your technical approach like I could see Hottie trust providing services the DPLA could use Hottie trust content being open to that providing the right APIs and hooks and stuff so I think it makes sense there to be both and I think who knows in 20 years maybe there'll be one thing or there'll be some complete difference in either of those two things but for now they're both focusing on different stuff but I think there's a lot of potential for them to end up meeting in the middle yeah that's a good point and we have to keep in mind that that even if they remain two separate initiatives that there could be a bridge built a virtual bridge that links the two together and because you're putting your stuff in Hottie trust doesn't mean you can't go into DPLA and use their stuff so there's going to be a lot of use for any given person of both of both tools other thoughts here I guess my question is really it seems like we're going to have a lot of these repositories in New Jersey we have a statewide New Jersey digital highway and to me these there are a lot of these that are already in place and the question is how do you connect them I just recently had two experiences one the 18th century journal called spectator we have a collection a digitized collection it's in Hottie trust we're just looking at digitizing back issues of our Rutgers University library journal it's in Hottie trust we're not members of Hottie trust and so you know this is really kind of a complex decision you know whether we should join and we should rely on Hottie trust for a lot of these materials whether we should do it ourselves and I don't think we have my perception is that we haven't worked out a policy on how to approach this and you know maybe in the meantime we need to figure out how to connect all these various repositories somehow the user interface would be quite complex I think in the end with the things that you have digitized are you satisfied with the long-term preservation strategies that you're using to save these yeah yeah sure you know I just take a lot of heart in the fact that DPLA is looking at ways to is looking at some aggregated models because from where I said I'd love to see you know some of the more local institutions digitizing the spectator and other resources and then aggregating the metadata into these larger repositories in various ways in various repositories but I agree with you it's messy and it's probably going to continue to be messy for a while until at least until people develop trust that wherever they're putting their stuff it's going to be safe there and last there and be taking care of really well but yeah one of the things we've appreciated with the MWDL is just you know how you can if you come up with the right technical infrastructure you can have things be managed locally but available centrally I hope DPLA will look at some of those options in its models for its infrastructure and every institution has unique resources like the papers of Jack London for example there's only going to be one institution that holds that so increasingly I think at our shop at Utah State University that's one of our selection criteria is has this been digitized already can our users get access to it already and in that case we move on to something else well I'm embarrassed to admit this but I Google it and one of the things folks in Nevada have done a really good job with the help of Liz Bischoff who many of you may know and going around to literally hundreds of cultural heritage institutions and saying what do you have and what of it is digitized and what of it has copyright that allows us to license this for online display et cetera and we've talked about maybe doing that in other parts of the town west as well because it is really helpful as you say it's kind of start being efficient a little more efficient about this but also the mess is going to happen too you have to allow the mess to happen because it leads to different interesting stuff I think there's one more question here so I'm going to hop to that there's more so for Toby if the lines of access and participation between the academy and the public are blurred by a shared resource like the DPLA what effect if any will this have on the nature of scholarship well it occurs to me now that as one of the handful of public librarians it's kind of soon that I'm being tapped to make these sweeping generalizations about the scholarly community but that being said I'm just going to wipe the flops wet off my forehead and just plunge into it we're talking about this and you talk about the the remix culture a lot and how there's this newly there's the pace at which things are released and then commented upon and blended and turned into new objects that it's become much more dramatic than it's always been and again pardon for these stereotypes it runs counter to some of the provincialism and some of the pace to exist in the scholarly community things like just the process of how things can take months upon months upon years to get published the way these things move through and we're now reaching this point to where things like a retweet or a Facebook share can have, can set just as many ripples through the environment as something like a citation in another journal speaking as a librarian I think we have a responsibility to not just help encourage that process but to monitor it and try to find some way to archive how these transactions are taking place and having an open environment an open linked environment can help to facilitate that blending and help to kind of blur some of those lines between just sort of this the commentary from the general public and from the academy but as I started thinking about this it started just leading like Michael said just leading to more and more questions and that's where I'm hoping I can hear some other comments from all of you Any past to your microphone? Having been participating in sort of digital scholarly initiatives for probably 10 years or so now well more than that maybe almost 15 what I find over and over again is you hear people talking about things like the American Memory Collection at LC, over and over again scholars build digital collections that they make publicly available online thinking that only scholars will use them and finding that over and over again far younger people there's a far greater audience for what they put up there than they ever thought Edward Ayers at the University of Virginia put up you know this Salem which well Edward Ayers did the Civil War thing but there was also a Salem Witch Trial site and they found that you know we were thinking only scholars would use this but you put it online it's sort of the easiest way to make it available to all scholars but the public just latches on to it I mean from what I understand you know high schoolers never used to get to work with primary sources it's common now in schools for students to get to work with at the very least they get to see images primary sources images and then often that leads to a field trip to go work with those primary sources and you know I put up my scholars my sort of like arcane specialist scholarship on the Villanelle originally 16th century poetic form and I get emails about that from people who are not in the academy and it's always remarkable so I'm all about this I think this is a good thing a shared resource like the DPLA a shared sort of semi centralized resource I think we'll have the effect of trickling scholarship down you know that's good and just a quick follow on to Amanda's point this doesn't really have to do with scholarship but I come from a user experience background an information architecture background and it's kind of become a truism with teams I've worked with that if you design tools for the advanced user you don't benefit the novice user but if you design for the novice user you benefit the advanced user because advanced tools have been conflated sometimes with difficult to use and it's not true people experts don't like to have tools that are difficult to use any more than the beginners do they want them to be more powerful but not more difficult to use so I think what we're seeing is as we learn more about how to design digital discovery tools for a general audience those benefits trickle down to an academic and elite audience so true that the laws of simplicity you've read that book there's a guy's name John Media anyways, good start if I may just on a similar note kind of tie into what you were saying our keynote speaker cited Clay Scherke and another one of his ideas that I fully subscribe to is this idea that things don't become technologically or don't become socially interesting until they become technologically boring and by focusing on creating a space that gives the casual observer something a much richer level of content to comment on and interact with and discover lots of new kind of serendipities gives the academic environment far more material to work with and I think it's a priority for all of us involved with this project to do something to facilitate both sides of that yes okay in the interest of time I have to move on real quick here but it's right back to you Toby in politics the critics of big tent parties argue that they alienate the ideological base of the party and diminish participation in collaboratively raising a big tent digital library what if anything do we stand to lose well this this is another question that just raises more questions I think we're in a space where the model that's being created here tends to rattle a lot of the existing structures whether it's with the traditional publishing environment or the in public libraries there's a certain provincialism you know we pride ourselves on having strong local understandings but often times you know that's taking into account the object just as a fixed point it doesn't go out next the possibility of it having a connection to another community there's a collective ignorance about that and so I guess the risk is how do we do this without losing the interest of the people who already have a stake in here and what other questions are going to emerge from that okay and I hate to just like cruise through this but we're running out of time so I'm just going to jump to the next question how can public libraries best contribute their greatest resource the attention and creative efforts of their patrons and staff to a national digital library Michael okay well a digital public library has to be designed from the outset to be your rewrite concept to go both ways I think in the history of digital repositories and librarianship to this point has been about the collection it's first it's digitized the catalog then it's digitized so you're digitizing the pointers to objects that now it's been digitizing the objects and as David Weinberger said in the keynote it's sort of that idea of the conversation around things can actually have more value than the things themselves it's the original object will kind of take care of itself but the inner relationship between things is really the key a lot of this is in network architecture again that idea of very simple network architecture unique identifiers for everything unique identifiers for people so that their comments and their links and their attributions and their creations can be shared and tracked along with them but this idea of APIs and openness all of these things are going to contribute to a network that can go both ways where we can really the social network layer is no longer something that gets buttered on the bread at the end of the process anymore I think in 2011 the conception of a national digital library has to have as part of the infrastructure sharing and contribution and a two way conversation in a very easy democratic way to get materials into the system and that should get easier over time I'll leave it there I could not agree more I think that's really well said I kind of hate that we have to end this now but we are at time I think that if you guys are on Twitter and you want to continue this conversation there I think that I know I'm going to be looking at that as well thank you all for your contributions to this conversation this has been really great oh sorry and this is us