 Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to today's Webcast. At this time, all lines have been placed on the listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for your questions and comments following the presentation. If you'd like to ask a question during the Webcast, you may do so by clicking on the ask a question button located under the presentation. Simply type your question into that box and hit submit. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to Judy Rumberg, floor is all yours. Thank you, and good afternoon. My name is Judy Rutenberg from the Association of Research Libraries, and I welcome you to this webinar this afternoon. I'm joined by Nancy Marin and Sarah Pickle, two of the lead authors on searching for sustainability strategies from eight digitized special collections, a case study report and project generously funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. We do have an all-star lineup today on our Webcast with many of the authors of our report representing the case studies investigated. We will be taking questions as suggested at the, so please do type those in, and we will field them at the end for our presenters. A recording of this Webcast will be posted on ARL's YouTube channel following the event, and if you are following us on Twitter, you can use the hashtag sustain, D-I-G-C-O-L-L-S. So before I turn this over to Nancy Marin from Ithaca SNR, just again a welcome and a thank you to our speakers on behalf of ARL and its program for transforming research libraries. Thank you, over to you, Nancy. Thank you, Judy, and welcome everyone to this webinar. My name is Nancy Marin. I'm the Program Director for Sustainability and Scholarly Communication at Ithaca SNR, and I am Sarah Pickle. I'm an analyst at Ithaca SNR and a co-author on the paper. And our third team partner in this project is Deanna Markham, who is the Managing Director of Ithaca SNR, who just cannot join us today. Before we get into the presentation, we also wanted to make sure that we thank IMLS for their generous funding and support, and our advisory committee, who has been so wonderful. You'll hear shortly about all of our terrific participants in the actual case studies, but before we start, I'll give a small overview to get us going. Collections, and many of you know this even better than we do, have long held a certain promise for libraries as these rare and unique materials that can really distinguish an institution from another. And some museums, archives, historical societies, obviously a great deal of what they hold is indeed rare and unique. In recent years, the opportunity to digitize these holdings, whether it's a collection of photographs, audio, videotape, paper archives, has helped not just to preserve and protect fragile originals, but really to turn what will once local collections into a global collection accessible to anyone with an internet connection. And yet, there's still a question that hangs out there isn't there. Is the act of digitizing really enough? Have the collections been neatly integrated into the institution's daily work? Are they quietly sitting somewhere, gently off to the side? Are people using them, and how are they using them? Have the collection gone from being a local collection to really taking a life of its own, continuing to grow and attract users, developing in new and exciting ways over time? And for all of this, how are the project leaders of these projects faring in their quest to secure support and financing for this important work over the long term? When this project first started, which I believe was back in 2010, Ithiga SNR had recently published some of our early work on sustainability in the form of a series of case studies focused on funding models. In partnership with ARL, we decided to apply some of the findings from that early work to get a real sense of what makes a digital project tick, what makes it truly sustainable, and to take that and look at the case of special collections. IMLS supported this idea and actually encouraged us to expand the study beyond academic libraries to include cultural institutions as well. So we set about identifying eight case studies. We probably screened close to 200 of them with our research team, with our advisory committee, and finally we selected four from academic institutions and four from other types of cultural institutions that met a specific set of criteria for sustainability that we had been able to develop in our earlier work. The first criteria was public benefit and impact. So those different cultures compare impacts across projects. We needed to hear that the project team was thinking about this and could demonstrate some kind of continued impact, whether that was a qualitative or quantitative measure. That could be the size of the audience, the usage, the type of engagement, other measurements like that. Financial stability. We wanted to hear project leaders tell us about how they had found the means to attract the resources they needed to support the ongoing vitality of the project. Many had grants, but we found ourselves also gravitating to those that didn't just have grants, that also had done other creative things, whether it's working with partners or trying some kind of creative revenue generation. And finally, possibly the most obvious one, longevity. The projects we selected had each have been in existence for two years. So in order to see how a range of institutions managed the long-term care of their digitized collections, we carefully selected these eight. And then looking at things like operating budget as a proxy for size, we made sure that half of them were from larger institutions and half were from smaller. So we're hoping that you and the audience will have lots of different kinds of examples and different scale of examples to choose from. Our method involved interviewing key players at each institution to understand not just what they're doing now to keep their collection vital to their users, but also how they arrived at the models that they're using today. So I should mention probably that each of these resulted in an actual article. There are eight case studies that are up on our website now. However, although we would love it if you would read them all, the really exciting part is getting to hear from the actual people who work on these projects. So today we are so pleased to have with us from around the country, all phoning in from wherever they are, the leaders and key staff from each of the eight digitized special collections that we study. With so many fascinating collections, time is awfully short on this call today. We are so aware of this, but we're gonna have them highlight some of the strongest themes that we saw emerging in our research. The project leaders are gonna speak to a specific point and maybe branch out a little from there. They're gonna share with us what it is they're working on, how they decided to take that route, and they may even highlight some of the issues that they still see ahead. So we're gonna ask that as questions arise for you, you type them in as you think of them and we're gonna gather them. At the end of these presentations, we'll then start fielding a bunch of questions, but we're gonna see if we'll have each of the eight do their presentations first. So without further ado, Sarah's gonna start us off. With many projects housed at institutions, there's an enticing opportunity to get some form of ongoing support from the home institution. This doesn't come automatically, however. So several of these projects provide good illustrations of ways to be sure you're aligning with the core mission and the goals of your host institution. First we'll hear from Joy Paulson, the Director of the Essential Electronic Agriculture Library at Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University. She's also Project Director for Cornell's Hards Collection. Joy? Hello everyone, I'm glad to be with you. Mann Library is the second largest of 16 libraries that are part of the Cornell University Library system and we serve the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Human Ecology, which in earlier days was known as the College of Home Economics. We chose as part of supporting our relationship with the College of Home Economics to undertake a project in which we would gather together the core historical literature of home economics and digitize it and make it available online. This was definitely helped us. This worked well for us because we definitely had a strong relationship with the college. We had missions as part of our university because Cornell University Library had been involved in digitizing from the early 1990s and we felt that this was a good opportunity to build a collection that would be of interest and use to one of the colleges that supports our library. We also had a very early School of Home Economics at Cornell and we thought we had a very strong collection in which to choose the materials from. We applied for funding and received funding initially through IMLS, which allowed us to do the major portion of this project. But since that time, we have been able to continue funding at a low level and assigning staff members to have small amounts of their work that are connected to this project to continue to add further materials to the project and to keep the website functioning and up to date. So, well, initially probably 30% of my time was involved in the project and I had a full-time preservation assistant and I had quite a bit of time from a programmer and we had input from other parts of the library staff. Over time, perhaps 10% of my time, half-time of a preservation assistant and maybe 20%, 30% of a programmer's time enabled us to keep doing this work and we were able to use funds that the college made available to the library for undertaking projects. And so this really became much more programmatic. The only major funds that we've had to keep the project going was the IMLS grant. Additionally, we were quite surprised to find out even though we thought we had a strong home economics collection, when we developed the bibliographies for each of the subjects in the area, that there were many highly ranked titles that we were not able, that we did not have in our collection. And through actually our contacts in agriculture, there's an organization called Usain, the United States Agriculture Information Network, which is largely agricultural librarians. Many of them, there's some overlap between the two subject areas and many of them also have interest in home economics. And so we were able to work with a number of libraries that also had strong collections like Penn State University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of California, Berkeley, who lent us public domain materials that we were able to digitize and add to the collection. And I think that by focusing on the mission and making sure that the collection was something that was not only supported within the library but was supported by the college that helped fund the library that we have been able to keep the site not only active but growing over time. Terrific, Joy. Thank you so much. Were there any questions from any of our speakers on this topic? Okay, well, that's been wonderful to hear. We're going to next talk about a slightly different theme but even one that Joy pointed towards which is a focus on audience. While there are lots of different ways that projects focus on audience, we chose three right now but we probably could have chosen many more. Today we're going to hear from Katrina Hartness, the Education Officer at the State Archives of Florida to tell us about the extensive investments that her team has made in user outreach and understanding. We'll next hear from Robin Chandler, Associate University Librarian at UC Santa Cruz to tell us about the role that her team has played in identifying the fans not just of the archive but the fans of the Grateful Dead who might care about the archive. And finally, the Director of Digital Projects at the Maine Historical Society, Kathy Amoroso, will share a bit about how Maine Memory Network staff have worked not only with thinking about the end users but one of their key stakeholder groups, the actual local and regional historical societies who will form the 27 or the 270 partners that have helped to build up the collection that they have today. So speaking for us will be Katrina from Florida Folklife. Hello everyone, this is Katrina Hartness from the State Library and Archives of Florida with the Florida Memory Program. So I'll be talking about finding our audience for the Florida Folklife Collection and it's a little intimidating to be talking about audience when I'm speaking next to the Grateful Dead Archives. But the Florida Folklife Collection is part of Florida Memory which provides online access to almost 500,000 items from the collections of the State Library and Archives of Florida. New material is added weekly. If you'll see, when we first started looking at the Florida Folklife Collection we weren't planning to digitize the recordings, we were just going to catalog the audio recordings and we quickly realized that we were going to want to make those available online and that actually shaped our website. The audio, there's now an audio section which is one of the main six components of our website. And audience is very important to us because we rely on grant funding and public support to continue our existence. The Florida Memory Program is administered by the Florida Department of State's Division of Library and Information Services and is funded primarily through LSTA funds. The Florida Folklife Collection Digitization Project was funded through an IMLS Grant Leadership Grant. In 2003, we knew the Florida Folklife Collection was popular but we didn't know if it would reach an audience online that extended beyond the core of researchers who already came to the archives. The collection was created and collected by the Florida Folklife Program. Peggy Bolger was Florida's first state folklorist and she went on to become the folklorist at the Library of Congress. The program gathered earlier material including writings by Zora Nell Hurston from the Florida Writers Project in the 1930s and recordings from the Florida Folk Festival dating back to 1954. The Florida Folklife Tourist embarked on a series of fieldwork expeditions and set out to survey the state. They recorded music traditions, occupations. One of the interviews included a railroad worker, Tom Watson, who talked about his 30 years on the Jacksonville Railroad with the famed Orange Blossom Express and he talked about issues of segregation and integration. We also have an interview with a Rainbow Springs boat captain who does the traditional chant that's over a hundred years old and if you listen to that you can feel you're in a glass bottom boat with the fish sliding under you. It's really glorious. The program continues to collect recordings from the Florida Folk Festival which is the nation's longest running continuous folk festival featuring Florida folk artists such as Gamble Rogers, Will McClain and Ida Goodman, Goodson and national artists such as Vassar Clement, Stalk Watson and Pete Seeger. As part of our grant we created five educational units on net fishing, white oak basket making, seminal doll making, sacred harp singing and the Zorniel Hurston WPA papers. They received attention from teachers, some of who tell us they teach the units every year and also which was surprising to us many from people outside of education with an interest in the subject matter. The seminal doll making particularly had an emotional connection for people who remembered maybe coming to Florida and seeing the seminal dolls and the detail that went into making them including going out and gathering the palm fiber that was necessary to make the dolls to have a beautiful collection of both the series of slides and the interview. So we knew we had some great material but we didn't know how to let other people know what we had. Outside of a core group most people didn't really think hey great music when they thought about the state archives. So one of the first things we did after the collection was digitized and online in catalog was to put out a sample CD. Just a small selection of songs and spoken word to let people know what we had. It was free strictly educational since it was grant funded. It was immediately successful and we heard from people all around the country and the world. We found out then that Florida Folk has a following in England. It was popular in Australia. We were really kind of surprised by the number of people we heard from that called us and emailed us and told us they were interested in this music. We'd only planned for one CD but based on the reaction we put out another sample CD and then three more featuring gospel bluegrass and blues. Building on the continued request for the CDs over the years and we get requests daily. The next thing we planned to start is the Florida Folk Life Collection Internet Radio Program. The reaction of the Folk Life material was both more far reaching than we expected and also intensely personal. We would have people call to say things like we had the only known recording of their grandfather and could they get a copy. As part of our online outreach we became part of the Flickr Commons, a Library of Congress initiative to bring together photographs from cultural institutions around the world. Commenters identified people in the photographs or shared stories related to the photos remembering things like having a seminal doll from when they traveled to Florida years ago. We also began sharing the photos and recordings on Facebook and Twitter. We always say and it's true that the records of the State Archives don't belong to us. We're just keeping them for the people of Florida and the Florida Folk Life Collection has made that visible. This is truly a collaborative effort with the people of Florida. Thank you. That was terrific. Thank you so much, Katrina, for sharing that with us. Our next speaker is Robin Chandler speaking about the Grateful Dead Archive Online. Katrina, I just want to say thank you very much. It's an honor to be speaking with you well. It's a very exciting music project as well. And thank you for inviting me to participate in the webinar today. The Grateful Dead Archive represents one of the most significant popular culture collections of the 20th century and documents the band's activity and influence in contemporary music from 1965 to 1995. The collection contains works by some of the most famous rock photographers and artists of the era, including Herb Green, Stanley Mouse, Wes Wilson, and Susannah Millman. In April 2008, the Grateful Dead Band announced at a press conference at the Philmore in San Francisco that the group was donating its archives to the University of California at Santa Cruz. The band, really recognizing its history, thought to make the archives available for research in a traditional fashion, as well as through the internet where the band's 30-year history could be interpreted through the digital display of archives and artifacts. And based on this unique relationship between the band and its fans and the fan tape sharing of live performances, the library really felt it was a natural progression to try to seek to build a socially constructed collection. So we knew we had a very special opportunity to engage a living community of dead heads and that it was an ideal time to leverage social media providing fans with tools to tag, comment, comment, upload, and share their digital files, memories, and knowledge. And we concluded that the Omeka open source software would provide the best platform to support that collection. So in 2009, we received an IMLS grant to digitize over 45,000 items and build the website we now know, affectionately as GDAO or the Grateful Dead Archive Online. We released the website at the end of June, 2012, and at that time, we also released the Grateful Dead Archive collection for research by scholars, as well as opened a permanent Grateful Dead exhibit space in the library that we called Dead Central. It's important to note that we always recognize that we had multiple audiences for GDAO. First off, there would be the serious scholars of the Grateful Dead that could use the GDAO resource as well as our finding aid available in the online archive of California. There were the rights holders of the materials we had scanned, who in a sense were an audience, and then also the Grateful Dead heads who could help us build the collection online. In 2008, there was over 600 linear feet which transferred to the UCS library, and this was processed and the finding aid was created. And it's just important to note the kinds of materials that were there, records, photographs, posters, say, on handzines, tickets, t-shirts, videos of documentaries and performances, radio interviews, and also three-dimensional objects. A audience with the rights holders of all of this question, we compiled a list of over 400 photographers and artists whose work is represented in the collection, and we sought to go out and seek permissions from them to be able to put the material up online. It was a very diligent process. By the end of June, 2012, when GDAO was released, we had received 50 signed licenses. There's a lot to say about that. It's a very interesting effort that we wonder went but I'm gonna move on to talk a little bit more about building with the socially constructed collection. The current slides you're looking at now is essentially a slide that illustrates our search results in GDAO for some of the socially constructed materials. Since the end of June, 2012, the GDAO web services team has been tracking usage and demographics on the website. In the first year, GDAO has, I'm sorry, in our almost two years now, we've had over 163,000 unique visitors and a total of 231,000 visits. While the majority of the visitors have come from the United States, we've had visitors globally, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Spain, France, Australia, Sweden, and Italy. During that time, users have submitted over 140 digital images and files documenting their great robot experience. Through artwork, through their personal photographs, through their tickets and their stories and particularly their memories and their memories about how they became a deadhead revealing their favorite show or song. 300 items have been tagged and we've received over 1,000 comments. Community members are actively participating as chariots assisting with metadata additions and corrections. Looking ahead, the Grateful Dead project team has plans to continue digitizing materials from the GDA and making those materials accessible online through GDAO. In terms of looking to the future, our ongoing challenges are issues predominantly focused on around funding to sustain a programmer to continue to build and enhance the website as well as staffing to pursue and continue cultivating the community to build this socially constructed collection and community. Towards that end, we pursued and received another IMLS grant to build additional functionality into AMEKA and that functionality would be made available to the larger community of AMEKA users and indirectly would benefit GDAO and in terms of staffing, sort of working to build our social media capacity, we have a Grateful Dead archivist who's a permanent full-time employee but we are definitely working to spread that social media capacity throughout the library staff that can assist with reaching out to the community and working with them. So thank you. Thank you, Robin. Next up is Kathy Amaroso to tell us about the main memory network at the Main Historical Society. Thank you. So I'm Kathy Amaroso, Director of Digital Projects at the Main Historical Society and I wanna say that we're honored to be included in this study because sometimes we're stuck up here in Maine and we kinda think that we're a little shop just doing our own thing so it's nice to be recognized. So Main Memory Network began actually 12 years ago and when we first launched with about 2,000 items from the Main Historical Society. It was something that we got state funding for with the idea that from the beginning we wanted to be the online repository for all main primary source documents, if we could. And so now we have over 270 organizations that contribute items to Main Memory which amounts to about 45,000 items at the moment and that's growing all the time. The ratio is about 70% of the items are from contributors and about 30% from Main Historical Society. So in addition to serving and training contributors we are also trying to put up our own things. So Main Historical Society is a private member supported organization so we do not really get state funding. So it's all been grant funded at this point. So let's see, back in 2001 when we launched I was hired as the outreach coordinator on a grant that was called the Technologies Opportunity Program through the US Department of Commerce and the idea for that grant was to spread technology around the state. So we hired two other part-time outreach coordinators that were based one in Northern Maine and one in Down East which would be far Eastern Maine. And it was really important to us to have someone who knew that community and was part of those communities. So they didn't see it as someone from Portland coming into their place and taking their things. When we first started there was a lot of fear and people thinking that Main Historical Society was going to take their objects or that we were going to absorb the copyright of their things and so there was a lot of education we had to do on copyright and not that we're lawyers but we had to learn a lot and to try to ease their fears and say it's okay to put some of these things online. And so we worked for two years and continued to work on giving demonstrations and training and teaching contributing partners who may be just an organization that's one member, two members up all the way to the Main City Archives that actually has some paid staff how to digitize and put their things up on Main Memory Network. A lot of trainings, the way it kind of worked is that either someone will contact us, an organization will contact us and say, hey, we heard about Main Memory Network, we'd like to put something, we'd like to put our collections on or we might identify collections around the state and go kind of recruit them and say, this is a great collection, how do you feel about putting it online? So we offer individual training, which usually takes about two hours to show someone how to scan and catalog each item or we have also done group trainings and this is a picture of some group trainings, I'm not as mean as I look there. And there's a lot of hand holding and because a lot of these organizations have volunteers or older staff or older people that are sometimes scared of technology, so we help them sometimes not even, not just learn how to scan, but how to use their computer and the other thing that's really important is to have a user friendly website and to make it easy for them and I'll show a cataloging slide in a minute, but this shows how we really value our contributors and we make it very prominent where each item is contributed from. So here you can see contributed by and there's the name of the organization that then links to contact information about them. So a user or visitor to the site could know exactly where that item is. We also watermark the items to help alleviate fears from the contributors that people are just going to come here and steal their items. They're low resolution, it's not high resolution images anyway. This is a cataloging page just the top of it and it's very simple with a username and password based on Dublin Core, we train people how to fill out the information about each item and quality is really important to us as opposed to quantity. So we may have contributors who only put up 12 items but we work with them to really have them flesh out the information in the record and tell us why that's important to include in the archives and why a user would want to do that. So over the years we've continued the outreach, continued the training, we have gotten a variety of different grants for different reasons and here's a picture of some group training that we've done for a grant where it was to create community projects, it was called the main community heritage project and we trained different groups that included a school, historical society and a library to build online exhibits and actually a mini website. And we actually have a staff of about three that works primarily full-time on main memory network and our web properties and that's how we've been able to focus so much on doing this. It's our priority when someone calls to become part of main memory network, we go out, we train them. We do find that the individual training actually works a little better than the group training just because each person has a different setup and different levels of understanding of technology. So one-on-one there's a lot of hand-holding and also, and I'm just getting into some challenges here, is that the main memory network or digitizing their collections is not always the first priority of an organization. So often they will tell us that oh, I don't have the time and we try to, or they're overwhelmed. I don't know where to start. So we will work with them to try to identify key collections and say okay, why don't you just start here. And then we have some things we have coming up to continue our communication with them is we have conferences, contributing partner conferences, and we have one planned in the spring. And then we also just received a grant to include items from individuals, which is really scary, but we have to define what we're going to do and how we're going to do this, but that's the next step for the memory network. Thank you so much, Kathy. And also, Robin and Katrina, we appreciate it. So we all know that the costs associated with things like this kind of audience research and the outreach that we just heard about for these collections, as well as all the other activities involved in caring for them over the long term are far from insignificant. So whether we're paying to license software or to migrate files as technology changes, but the costs rarely ever go away. Staff from several of the collections we studied found clever ways to manage their costs by distributing production and management work across multiple partners and even agreeing to share a platform with like-minded institutions. On that latter point, we'll hear from John Andrews, former head of special collections at Haverford College Library and Project Leader for Quakers and Slavery. And he'll speak about how his collection benefits from the Tri-College Partnership of Haverford College, Swarthmore College and Brentmore. John? Thank you, it's great to be here. I should say that Haverford is a small liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia. And the two other colleges that we're in consortium with, Brentmore College and Swarthmore College are also in the area outside of Philadelphia. So in addition to the three colleges having this library consortium, Haverford and Swarthmore both have very strong internationally recognized collections of Quaker history and material. And so at the end of, or in 2008, that was the anniversary of the end of the slave trade in North America. And my colleague, Chris Stensmore at Swarthmore and I thought that we would like to do something to sort of commemorate that. At the same time, we got involved in planning a conference, an international conference that was held in Philadelphia on the topic of Quakers and slavery in 2010. And so those two things were sort of meeting with us for us putting together a grant proposal for digitizing materials on the topic of Quakers and slavery. One of the things that we thought would be really strong about this was that this would allow us to bring together materials that had really never been together before. For those who know anything about the history of Quakers, there was the great schism from 1827 until 1950. And so not only were different Quakers divided, but the materials of Quakers got divided between our two repositories. So it was a great opportunity for us to be able to bring these back together. The project consists of both a website that includes things like a timeline, essays on people, organizations and themes and shows some relationships between different people, as well as the collection of digitized materials which lives on an instance of content DM. So we were grant funded by the State of Pennsylvania's LSTA grant, a digitizing grant. And to the tune of about $33,000, we used all of that money to pay for students in the intern hourly pay. We were already set up digitizing, we had the equipment, we contributed staff time. So it was great to be able to put all of that money directly into cheap labor of students and interns so we were able to get so much out of them. The students did a range of work from data entry and scanning to metadata creation, including doing first passes on subject analysis which then librarians would follow up on. The interns did a lot of the coding for the website. And all involved had an opportunity to write essays for the website in addition to no good scholars that we sought out to contribute to some of those essays. The project really depended very heavily on the staff, the project staff writing very thorough procedural documents and spending a great deal of time training the students and the interns and reviewing their work. So the time put into that was really paid off marvelously. As I said, it's sort of in two parts, the website and then the repository of materials on TRIPTIC. TRIPTIC is a Content BM instance and we share one instance among all three schools. So it's in Marr, Hathawayford and Swarthmore College. It includes about 54 collections. Most of those are collections that are individually at one school, but some are combined. This sharing, a consortium sharing goes very deep for the three schools, not only do we share TRIPTIC but also a joint library catalog joint institutional repository, another database of art and artifacts and the three schools also share collection development responsibilities. So the way that this platform TRIPTIC as well as others are managed, the oversight is spread out at various levels and two different people in groups at the three schools. Individuals at any of the three institutions can elect to create a collection and be the digitizing and metadata and sort of be in charge of that themselves or in our case with Quakers and Slavery it was two schools with sort of multiple people involved. And then each platform that we work on has one super user who sort of deals with is the first line of defense for dealing with problems either submitted by users or by other librarians and helps to set metadata standards and keep people to some degree on the same page about all of that. And then there's systems administration for content DN for TRIPTIC and the systems work is all done at Bryn Maw College but is supported financially by all three schools. And then there is an advisory committee the technology advisory group that's made up of librarians and technologists from all three schools. And so this sort of tiered approach where you've got individuals making decisions about their collections and the super user may be trying to solve problems just since people maintaining the systems and an advisory group that sort of oversees larger scale issues. So John, that's perfect but I think we're gonna need to move on to the next is there a final word you'd like to have? I'm sure I'll just say that as challenges we the site continues to grow but we certainly have limited staffing at the institutions and other competing demands and there's other things that we also wanna be doing and so that makes it difficult to continue in such a robust way but it does continue incrementally. But thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that with us and I apologize for that prompt but we wanna make sure everyone has a chance to come in and we still want to come with us we're gonna do questions and answers following so I'm sure there'll be people who have questions for you as well. You know, we love hearing these examples also of cross management and ways to creatively work with students, work with partners and work with other institutions to bring costs down but we're also aware that that doesn't always get everyone as far as they need to get and there are times when you may find that you need to seek some kind of revenue generation. In this section we're going to hear from Jody Combs the associate dean of Vanderbilt University Library who will tell us about the Vanderbilt television news archive and it's sponsorship programs following him will be the president of the American Antiquarian Society, Ellen Dunlap who's gonna talk to us about her institutions and institutions licensing model. Jody? Hey, thank you and thanks to Jessica SNR for generating this report. We're pleased to have been a part of it. I do wanna mention the slide you're seeing on your screen is from the screenshot from our new website for the archive which we hope to launch in the coming months. Most of you will probably have heard of the Vanderbilt television news archive and know something of its history so I won't go over that sensitive to long one. Other than to say that the archive contains recordings and abstracts of over 45 years or broadcast news from the major US networks along with the range of special broadcasts such as those of presidential speeches and congressional hearings. This past year the archive received an Emmy and the governor's award for Lifetime Achievement from the Mid-South chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. It's an absolutely unique resource and we consider it to be among our most important special collections. The theme I've been asked to chat about a bit today has to do with decisions over the years to develop funding streams to cover some of the costs of running the TV news archive. Of course, maintaining and operating an archive involves significant ongoing costs. The Vanderbilt Library and University have been very generous in supporting the archive over the years and continue to do so. But we try very hard to offset the direct costs of the ongoing operation through a variety of external funding streams. These do not by any means cover all the costs of maintaining the archive but cover most of the direct costs for ongoing operations. I'd like to mention three or four primary funding streams. One is fees that we receive associated with the loading of our materials. These fees relate to the activities associated with the work of compiling segments, creating DVDs and the shipping and tracking and receiving those items. From the very beginning, following its three month pilot phase, which is now, by the way, going on 46 years, there was a thought that the archive would have fees for certain services, initially for compilations of materials to be loaned on tape. These days, the process of creating a compilation is partially automated and less labor-intensive and of course we use DVDs instead of tape in most cases. But these fees continue to be a source of funding, although it is somewhat unpredictable from year to year. It's difficult to be certain, but I would venture to say that revenue from this source is generally trending downward, possibly due to the increase in alternate sources for some of the materials or for materials that might substitute for them for research and teaching purposes. A second funding stream established more recently comes from institutional sponsorships. These are primarily institutions of higher education or research organizations, which rely on the work of the archive and contribute to support its ongoing operations. Sponsors of the archive receive a few benefits. At this time, they have access to our abstracts, which contain over one million records of program segments. They are also allowed streaming access to a portion of our collection, of course under tightly controlled conditions. And I would like to mention the significant but indirect benefit of helping ensure the archive is able to operate. We continue to examine other potential benefits we might be able to offer sponsors. This particular funding stream amounts for a growing percentage of direct operations and is a bit more predictable than that of the loan fees. It continues to grow, but it's not growing as fast as we would hope. A third stream comes from an annual contribution from the Library of Congress. This is a fixed amount of funding, and although it does not account for the largest percentage of funding for direct operations, it is the most predictable source. We continue to provide preservation quality copies of our recordings and our records to Library of Congress for permanent preservation. And so they also contribute by being the preservation partner for the archive, which to my mind, it is an even more significant contribution than the funds they are able to provide. A fourth stream of funding, which has also been present since the very beginning of the archive is philanthropy. From time to time, we receive gifts from foundations and individuals who value the work of the archive and want to contribute to its continuing operations and to ensure its future. This is also an unpredictable funding source to date, and while greatly appreciated, is the smallest of the four streams. We continue to pursue opportunities to increase this stream, so if anyone listening today has deep pockets and a passion for history of broadcast news and our shared cultural history, please give me a call. I'd love to talk with you. It's not the case, as is sometimes assumed, that grant funding provides significant support for ongoing operations. The archive has been successful in attracting grant funding over its history, but those funds have typically been related to short-term projects, to address changes in technologies or in a few cases for urgent rescue missions to rescue items from the deteriorating recordings, not really for ongoing operations. While all of these funding sources combined largely offset the direct cost of ongoing operations, I believe it's not wise to assume that they will do so indefinitely. During its 45 years of operation, the archive has seen drastic changes, not only in technologies, but in the economic environment which impacts its operation. A simple illustration should serve to make the point. How many recording companies that you have currently rely on business models based exclusively on selling vinyl LPs and 45 LPMs? For those of you who know what those mean. As technologies change, they often drive changes in the economic environment and business models. The converse is also true. Sometimes economic changes will drive changes in technologies. In either case, the archive will be impacted by these types of changes as much as any other operation would be. For this reason, even as we continue to rely on the funding sources I've mentioned, we are actively exploring additional and different options. I'm not sure yet what new sources or models for support may emerge, but I believe it will continue to be critical to seek out additional options. We hope to convene conferences in the coming years to focus on this issue, along with very important questions raised by the changes in the way people receive and consume the news in an age of social media. I'm excited by the prospects for the archive. In a time when the tools for voice speech and pattern recognition are maturing and techniques for large-scale data mining are becoming more commonplace, the opportunities for innovative uses for the materials in the archives are enormous. I believe I'll leave it at that, so we'll have more time for questions from our participants. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jodi. Next we'll hear from Ellen Dunlap of the American Antiquarian Society. Hi, everyone. I'm gonna keep my remarks very brief. The report that Deanna Markham wrote on our digitization strategy for Ithaca is very complete, and I do recommend it to everyone on the call. Ours is a very different kind of approach, and we recognize that there are some controversy surrounding the approach that we have taken, and I think that Deanna has done an excellent job of addressing the controversy, but also trying to point out how a program such as Ours, which is very big-scale, could have lessons for smaller institutions as well. The American Antiquarian Society of the National Research Library of American History ours is a comprehensive collection documenting our nation's history through the year 1876. We were founded in Worcester, Mass in 1812, and we continue to flourish here with a robust program of research fellowship seminars, online exhibitions, and educational offerings for academics, undergraduates, and the general public. We are an acquiring institution. If it's created in America before 1876 and we don't have it, we want it. We sometimes can't afford it, and that's why we have turned to revenue generation, such as our digitization, to help us build our collection and support our mission. I think it's important to point out, and for you all to understand, that we are entirely independent. We are not part of a university or a government body. We are independent in terms of our governance, but also independent in terms of our funding. We have to balance our own budget. But one way of looking at us is that we are a private institution, but for the public good. We developed our digitization strategy in about 2006 as a formal initiative, but we have been in partnership with commercial publishers and information companies since 1955. We started in the micro-opaque card business and moved through microfilm and microfiche into the digital era. But as we looked at the broadening our commercial partnerships, we deliberately sought out a variety of digital publishers, each with different business models and markets. Some of the companies that you see with logos here on the screen are database companies. Some are print on demand publishers. Some do e-books. Some are in cookbooks, genealogy. Most are in the academic research space, but we deliberately wanted to have a diverse portfolio of business plans and partners. We also did something a little bit different. We wanted to capitalize on the strength of the collection, not only in terms of our collection holdings, but also our metadata and the bibliographical knowledge of our catalogers and curators. So we developed partnerships that were interested in having us as co-partners in the shaping of the products, using our expertise. And we hired a business development consultant to manage these publisher relations and to negotiate all of our contracts. Briefly, our strategy is two-fold. It is a financial return that we are looking for and we are also looking for them to do the scanning for us and turn the ownership of the scans over to us so that open access at the end of the commercial publishing effort can be possible. And that is our intention with all of the scans that we have received. Thus far, we have gotten more than $10 million in cash royalties and we don't have them all yet, but so far we have about 25 million scans that have been created on our behalf. And these will come to us, as I say, at the end of the licensing period. But this is not our only digital strategy. We also have in-house digitization that's done and we do that some through grant-funded projects but patron orders and staff requests, online exhibitions. And we have about 80,000 scans currently in our digital asset management system, which we call GG. And those are freely available on our website and are making the rich collections that we hold here of available to scholars and the general public alike, especially in the areas of manuscripts and graphic arts materials that are outside of the partnerships we have with publishers, which tend to be more text-based. I would say that in closing, the terms of our contracts are specified on page five of the report, the Ithaca report. And I think that I would recommend you look for the details of how we've set up the contracts. You should look there. Thanks so much, Ellen and Jody. Last but not least, we have touching on staffing and leadership. So perhaps it's because of the financial constraints that few digital collections and even those discussed today fall under this category, have staff devoted full time to their leadership. The challenges can be compounded when the project's organizational model is a partnership of institutions even. The case studies have shown us that well-managed partnerships can be very powerful, but they can also pose challenges. Our final speaker, Carolyn Sheffield, who is Program Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library, is going to tell us a little bit about the role of partnership and support of the BHL. Thank you. As others have said, it's an honor and a pleasure to be included in this report and to have an opportunity to share information on the webinar. So thank you. My name is Carolyn Sheffield, and I'm the Program Manager for the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It's only a few minutes. I'm going to be very brief on the background information, so I really do encourage everyone to check out our website and create the 13 for Sustainability Report if you haven't already, to get some more context on how we got started and the extent of what BHL does, as well as to learn more about each of the other institutions that we've just heard from. So without further ado, what is BHL? In the nutshell, we're a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries with the mission of working together to make biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community. The reason that we're doing this is that the latest taxonomic literature, which means an important part of contemporary research in systematic biology, is often found only in the libraries of renowned natural history museums and botanical gardens throughout the world. And before BHL, these materials were usually only accessible to those who could afford to travel to those locations. So BHL was formed to provide wider access to these materials, and we now provide open access to over 42 million pages of biodiversity literature. BHL started in 2006 with 10 natural history libraries and has grown to 16 participating libraries in the US and UK. As a consortium, collaboration across these libraries is an inherent part of BHL and has been very important for achieving and maintaining success. BHL started out as a grant-funded project and has transitioned into a program that today is supported through a combination of membership dues, in-kind support from member institutions, contributions from the user community, and direct support from the Smithsonian libraries, as well as prevention from other institutions and grants for specific projects. These funding sources support the various pieces of the BHL organizational structure. So I'm just going to give a quick walkthrough of that structure, and then I'll give an example of how we work together across our institutional boundaries. So to get started, the executive committee is comprised of three individuals, three members, from three of the member institutions at the directory level. They provide governance and decision-making at the policy level for BHL as a whole. The secretariat is comprised of the program director, myself, and the collections coordinator, and so that's representing two and a half full-time employees dedicated to BHL, and the three of us are based at the Smithsonian libraries. We're diverted solely to the day-to-day operational management of BHL, and so we're engaged to the goals and product strategy level. We're responsible for things like proposing budgets and ensuring that BHL achieves the annual goals approved by the BHL executive committee. Members are dues-paying institutions, 13 of those 16 participating libraries are dues-paying members, and each of those institutions has a representative on the members' committee, usually also at the director level. Affiliates are institutions who may not be able to pay those annual dues, but who do make significant contributions in terms of in-kind staff time. And I should mention that in addition to dues, members also make very significant contributions in-kind contributions. In 2012, we were looking at about $2 million worth of in-kind across BHL, and that represented about 14.2 full-time employees. We also have a tech team that supports and maintains the BHL portal and continued development, and last but not least, BHL staff. These are the people on the ground at each of the participating institutions doing work such as scanning, responding to user requests, and feedback, and supporting the outreach efforts of the organization. So how do all of these components work across all of these different institutions across 16 different institutions? As one example, we have something called the PAN-BHL Scanning Fund. Each year, the members' committee, there's director-level folks at the participating institutions, vote on how much of the annual dues will be applied to PAN-BHL scanning. The secretariat then coordinates adding those funds through a contract with Internet Archive, and those funds become available as a pool that any dues paying member can draw from for scanning materials at their institution that will be made available through BHL. Obviously, we have 13 institutions sending money off of one contract. Everyone's going to need to do their part to track their own spending through the group as a whole does not ever spend. So we maintain collaborative spreadsheets where we track things like spending. As the program manager, I monitor that spreadsheet. We also have something called the monographic deduper that BHL staff use to prevent scanning of materials that are either already in BHL or already in process of being scanned by another participating institution. That duplication is monitored by the collections coordinator as part of her role on the secretariat as well. So there are many, many hands in the mix and I've covered only the very tip of the iceberg, but hopefully this kind of helps to illustrate how much commitment and time and dedication and oversight is needed from not just kind of the secretariat level, from all of the participating libraries to make the BHL the success that it's become and to ensure it's continued growth. Thank you so much. Thank you so much and that's such a great note to end on. We see there are a lot of questions coming in. First of all, thank you to these speakers, but before anyone goes anywhere, we're going to field these questions, but first we're going to ask you to respond to three very, very quick polls on this platform. So Amy, can you send that first question out to people? We'll give you just 15 seconds. It's just one click of a mouse and we'll ask you to answer them. Amy, is the first one coming? It should be coming. Okay. All right, Amy, let us know when we should move to the next question. We'll make sure our folks have a chance to respond, but it's really just one little click. All right, so having question one, closing question two. All right, and Amy, you want to read us the second question just to fill the air here? In addition to yourself, how many people viewed this webinar with you? Terrific, we just want to know. We are fascinated by the fact that there's such a deep interest in this. Obviously we care a lot about this and we know you all do too, and we just want to know who's out there. And how about the third question? Oh, the second question just showed up. Hang on one second. So the three, which of the case studies did you find most relevant to your situation? And here, we're not asking anyone to play favorites, but we are also just fascinated again to find out which example seemed like they're the juiciest or the ones that are going to help you do something different. You're learning about something you haven't learned before. We'll certainly share this with everybody. So if you can just take a moment to click. Amy, does it feel like we got what we need to get on that question? We're showing a little bit low numbers on people answering it. Okay. Oh, there we go. Yep. I think we're having trouble. Okay, just let us know. All right, you let me know when you've closed the poll and we'll start the questions and answers. Poll is closed. All right. So, Speeders, we've gotten a bunch of questions. Sarah's going to send us a couple. And for the ones we don't get to everyone, we're going to see how many we can get folks to respond to. We'll post the rest on the website. But Sarah, let's try the first question. Sure. We have a question that just came up actually about how the push to digitize and then put all these special collections and materials online and open access has affected the funding stream of special collections. I think that means more like materials funding streams. Since one stream usually came from providing copies of unique materials to users by charging for and into production, perhaps, and other similar things. So, would any of the speakers like to address that first? I can talk here at AAS. We have seen an increase in our requests for digital reproductions across the board. More access means more demand. This is Kathy from Main Memory Network. I would say the same thing. And there's also a question in here about have we considered selling reproductions of things on Main Memory? And yes, we actually have a sister site of Main Memory Network where we bring in about $24,000 a year from reproductions and the contributors get half of whatever the cost is that is sold. So, it makes it very accessible. Thanks for mentioning that, Kathy. Has anyone else had experience with selling? I mean, we've heard from Vanderbilt, but anybody else? All right, well, let's move on to another question then. We had a question about collaborations and whether sometimes people don't contribute the way that they initially had expected to be able to. How do you handle partners that don't produce according to the initial agreements between you guys? Any partnerships that didn't quite go that the way they had hoped they can speak to that? Of course, with all that. I can speak to that at Main Memory Network again. Yeah, we have people who are overambitious sometime and then they get into it and find that they just can't do it. We do what we can to help them along. Sometimes we will actually do some of the digitization for them and go to their place because they just find out they can't have the resources or something or don't have it. And other times, unfortunately, they just kind of drop it and we move on. And then maybe contact them later down the road and say, are you ready now or anything like that? So, that's kind of how we do it. Any other thoughts from, we have a couple of the project leaders who have very deep institutional partnerships. We're not asking you to say anything bad about a situation, but can you give any guidance about tips for good working partnerships? Of course, AAS is concerned. Obviously, in a portfolio play, you have some publishers that produce better results than others. And I think it's important in your licensing to have an exit strategy or ways. In fact, in some of our publishers, they're right to commercially produce or distribute the materials ceases if they don't meet certain benchmarks along the way. And it's all in the license contract. Jody, did you have something to add? Yeah, I think that would go for us as well. That is part of the agreement that we make with our sponsors, for example, include the APN number of requirements and if those aren't fulfilled then we move on as the same goes. We're from somebody who wants to understand a bit more about how the different institutions and collections demonstrate impact. And that's both on a qualitative measure and then a quantitative measure. Can anybody speak to how they track their impact in the public that they're reaching? This is Carolyn with BHL. We maintain a series of statistics works for our website and for all of our social media and outreach efforts. And we share these statistics on a quarterly basis who make them publicly available on our website through our quarterly reports. That's terrific. We're right up against the end of the 75 minute time period and it's heartbreaking. We have so much more we would love to discuss with you but as I mentioned, we will capture these questions. We will ask our presenters to feedback to us and we will share this on our website, on our blog. Judy, if there's nothing else to add from you? That's it, thank you very much to the speakers and to the audience. Thank you so much everyone. We're so glad you could join us and we hope we'll get a chance to speak with you again soon. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's webcast. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines and have a great day.