technical services report

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TECHNICAL SERVICES REPORTTaemin Kim Park a , Michelle Sitko b , Rebecca L. Mugridge c & Linda G. Gabel da Indiana University , Bloomington, INb Marywood University , Scranton, PAc Pennsylvania State University Libraries , University Park, PAd Metadata Services Division , OCLC, Inc. , Dublin, OHPublished online: 17 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Taemin Kim Park , Michelle Sitko , Rebecca L. Mugridge & Linda G. Gabel (2002) TECHNICAL SERVICESREPORT, Technical Services Quarterly, 20:1, 49-63, DOI: 10.1300/J124v20n01_05

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TECHNICAL SERVICES REPORT

This column will feature reports on what is going on in the rapidlychanging, ever fascinating field of Technical Services. Each quarterlyissue will consist of reports on systems including new developments atthe bibliographic utilities and networks; conference happenings andreports from meetings; what’s new in technical services publications;as well as reports from technical services professionals on their re-search and projects. Such reports, announcements, and brief articlesfor consideration for inclusion should be sent to: Barry B. Baker, Edi-tor, “Technical Services Report,” Director of Libraries, University ofCentral Florida, P.O. Box 162666, Orlando, Florida 32816-2666.

REFORM INITIATIVES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION.A REPORT OF THE ALCTS SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONDISCUSSION GROUP PROGRAM. AMERICAN LIBRARY AS-SOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING, SAN FRANCISCO, JUNE 2001

In order to address the present crisis in scholarly communication pub-lishing and to inform colleagues about some of the more recent reforminitiatives taking place in publishing, universities and libraries, three re-nowned specialists in scholarly communications and electronic publish-ing were invited to share their work experiences and knowledge.

Zsuzsa Koltay, Coordinator of Electronic Publishing, Cornell Uni-versity Library, began the session with her talk about Project Euclid atCornell University. Koltay stated that the primary mission of ProjectEuclid is to advance the cause of effective and affordable scholarlycommunication in the disciplines of theoretical and applied mathemat-ics and statistics. Before giving more detailed information about ProjectEuclid, Koltay pointed out some of the unique characteristics of mathe-

Technical Services Quarterly, Vol. 20(1) 2002http://www.haworthpressinc.com/store/product.asp?sku=J124

2002 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 49

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matics journal publishing. Key characteristics were the large number ofjournal titles (over 500 core journals) and the important role of inde-pendent publishers, organizations that publish fewer than three jour-nals. Independent journals tend to be highly specialized and of veryhigh quality. They are also characterized by low subscription costs andlow circulation figures. Although they share certain concerns with sci-entific publishing, primarily due to the use of TeX, they also face issuesthat ally them more with the humanities such as a heavy reliance on peerreview and older literature. Koltay further elaborated on additional as-pects of independent journal characteristics and pointed out that theirhigh quality and low cost have played a major role in keeping the litera-ture of the field relatively affordable. Most of these important journals,however, do need help to develop and maintain a competitive onlinepresence.

Koltay viewed the vision of Project Euclid as one that would help tocreate the shared environment needed for the timely dissemination ofscholarly papers within an online information community. Specificgoals include achieving full online capability including searching, ref-erence linking within individual journals, across journals, and journalgroups; maintaining an affordable balance among commercial, societyand independent publications while at the same time achieving im-proved visibility; and addressing long-term preservation and archivalneeds for independent journals.

Instead of a full-service and high-cost online press, Koltay sees Proj-ect Euclid as a way of making Web-based publishing affordable forindependent journals by creating an enabling infrastructure for “do-it-yourself” online publishing. An additional immediate goal of ProjectEuclid is for it to serve as a repository based on the OAI (Online Ar-chives Initiative) convention. The three modules of Project Euclid, apreprint server for authors and users, a toolkit for editors, and the finalelectronic version of a paper journal, are currently under develop-ment. The journal-publishing module will become operational in thesummer of 2001.

Also discussed was Project Euclid’s funding and partnerships. Theproject is a joint endeavor of Cornell University Library and Duke Uni-versity Press, a publisher of a seminal mathematical journal. The proj-ect is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and was aided indevelopment by the following partners: the Institute of MathematicalStatistics, Applied Probability Trust, A. K. Peters, LTD, and the RockyMountain Math Consortium. Support from SPARC (Scholarly Pub-lishing and Academic Resources Coalition), other mathematical schol-

50 TECHNICAL SERVICES QUARTERLY

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arly societies, and Sun Microsystems, Inc. was also gratefullyacknowledged. The software used for the project is based on “Dienst,”which was developed by Cornell’s Computer Science Department andhas been successfully used for computer science technical reports. Fur-ther development of the software is underway to add editorial capabili-ties, to modify repository structures to allow for journal publishing, todevelop security and distribution control of subscriptions, as well as totailor the user interface. Production for the initial 11 journals is expectedto take place during the summer of 2001. Timetables for recruiting char-ter members, the editorial toolkit, and funding and cost recovery phasewere also described. Koltay predicted that at first journals will continueto control subscriptions and would pay Euclid for its services. As along-term economic model, the licensing of Euclid as a package holds alot of promise. For more information, visit http://ProjectEuclid.org.

The second speaker, Richard Fyffe, Assistant Dean of Libraries forScholarly Communication and Interim Associate Dean, University ofKansas (KU) Libraries gave a talk entitled, “Steps to an Ecology ofScholarly Communication.” Fyffe likened scholarly communication re-forms to the evolutionary changes in biological systems, genetic struc-tures, and regenerations. Many of the issues that Fyffe pointed out wereechoing those addressed in Project Euclid and the issue of sustainabilitywas similarly viewed as a major challenge in the process of reform.Fyffe described how KU had used the BioOne project at the KU cam-puses as a vehicle to promote awareness and discussion of the currentcrisis facing scholarly publishing.

Fyffe’s talk centered on the BioOne project, KU staff’s contribution,and the population dynamics experienced while promoting changeamong faculty members. Fyffe shared KU’s experience and describedhow the BioOne initiatives provided the fodder for discussion andraised awareness of the “ecological crisis” in scholarly communication.

BioOne is an electronic aggregation of 40 full-text journals in the bi-ological, ecological, and environmental science disciplines publishedby non-commercial scholarly societies. None of the journals involvedwere previously published electronically. A sample of selected titles in-cluded American Zoologist, The Auk, Environmental Entomology, etc.At this time, most of the BioOne database titles include interlinkswithin the citation level and will link to other journal and indexing data-bases. BioOne is fully searchable within each individual journal andalso across journals. It also includes e-mail alerts for new issues.BioOne was formally launched in April 2001 and is available for sub-scription.

Technical Services Report 51

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BioOne’s founders are represented by the American Institute for Bio-logical Sciences, the Big 12 Plus Library Consortium, SPARC, AllenPress (a commercial printer that specializes in scientific publishing),and KU. BioOne’s intent is to help scholarly societies in making thetransition to e-publishing without selling journals to commercial pub-lishers. Use of SGML architecture allows the content to migrate and toadapt to new technology and economic landscapes. The various societ-ies’ concerns about the possible loss of revenue from their print sub-scriptions is mollified by the setting up of a revenue-sharing model forlibraries, publishers, authors, and BioOne itself. The contract with thepublishers is non-exclusive, i.e., after the first year, publishers are freeto distribute the encoded version of the journal in other ways. The sub-scriber retains the subscription rights that include use of interlibraryloan, use in course reserves, and distance education. KU librarieshelped in licensing and contracts for both publishers and subscribers.KU also worked closely with Allen Press in technical and data design,including reference structure linking. KU staff created the MARC rec-ords for the electronic journals. The Allen Press contributed the markupof the articles and produced the BioOne database. SPARC provided ad-vice on marketing strategies and their membership contributed develop-ment funds. Also included in the process were the National TechnicalAdvisory Group, Library Advisory Board, and a Board of Directors thatincluded scientists, librarians, and other stakeholders.

Introducing BioOne to the KU community was used as a means toraise awareness in the campus community that there is a crisis in currentscholarly communication system. This project was to be viewed aproactive step being taken toward change in the current scholarly pub-lishing model. As a signal to the prevailing winds of change, the provostand the KU libraries jointly sponsored a campus-wide seminar for fac-ulty, graduate students and other members of the KU community called“From Crisis to Reform: Scholarly Communication and the TempePrinciples,” which was held in November 2000. More than 200 partici-pants joined in the daylong series of presentations and discussions thatwere centered on the Tempe Principles for Emerging Systems of Schol-arly Publishing that were disseminated prior to the seminar. Presenta-tions were made by David Shulenburger, KU Provost; Mary Case,ARL’s Office of Scholarly Communications; and Heather Joseph, Pres-ident and Chief Operating Officer of BioOne. The presenters spokeabout the rising costs and restricted access universities are faced with inregard to scholarly communications as well as some of the solutionsthat are in the process of being developed within the university and pub-


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lishing communities. A panel of faculty members from various aca-demic disciplines was invited to reflect and react to the issues raised.Groups were encouraged to further explore the Tempe Principles, ex-press reactions from their perspectives, and discuss possible specificcampus action steps.

The seminar provided a wonderful forum for the project participants. Itprovided an opportunity to share with the campus community that the costand access issues being experienced in their local campus community werechallenges that were also shared on national as well as international levels.It also revealed to seminar participants that the BioOne project was just oneof a number of experiments presently addressing these problems in thepublishing community. More information about the seminar is available atKU’s website http://www2.lib.ukans.edu/scholcomm/tempe/tempe.htm andwas also reported in the January 2001 issue of College & Research Li-braries News.

The third and final speaker, Robert Bovenschulte, Director, Publica-tions Division, American Chemical Society (ACS), spoke about “TheSPARC-ACS Partnership.” According to statistics of the Association ofResearch Libraries (ARL), the average cost of an academic journal shotup by 207% between 1986-1999. Subsequently, the number of journalsbought by libraries has dropped by 6%. In response, the ACS partici-pated in the initial ARL discussions that led to the formation of theScholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (seehttp://www.arl.org for more information on SPARC) and was the firstpublisher to affiliate itself with the new coalition. As the larger publish-ers are tightening their hold on the lucrative science journal market,SPARC, a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries and or-ganizations that encourages competition in the scholarly communica-tions market, is striving to introduce new solutions to scientific journalpublishing. SPARC facilitates the use of technology to expand access,and partners with publishers that bring top quality, low-cost research toa greater audience with the ultimate goals of curbing the spiraling costsof STM publications, attempting to return science to scientists. In re-sponse to these goals, an agreement was signed between SPARC andthe ACS in June 1998 and a partnership was born with the full supportof the ACS governance. Some of the key points of the SPARC-ACSagreement include a three-year partnership with a renewal option; agoal of creating one new publication per year; joint endorsement andadvocacy for the SPARC concept endorsing the ethical use of scholarlyresources; active communication lines to librarians, faculty, and admin-istrators; cooperation on research; and no exchange of money.


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Bovenschulte viewed some of the benefits of this partnership to includeimprovement in the present system of scholarly communication; find-ing a tangible way to reduce the per-unit cost of information; and havingprestigious sponsors like the ARL, other supporting organizations aswell as large and influential customers such as libraries. Other benefitsinclude the sheer excitement of playing an innovative role in technolog-ical change and experimentation with new models for organizing thesystem. Economic dimensions reported included the launching of anumber of new publications with influential customers upfront, a fastergrowth rate of subscriptions, and an expected long-term payback wereviewed as beneficial to the scholarly communications process.

When reviewing their progress report, Bovenschulte mentioned thatthe first publication project, Organic Letters, was launched in June1999 as the first letters journal published by ACS. Innovative featuressuch as Web manuscript submission; a reviewing and proofing systemserving as an instructive example; inclusion of prestigious editors andeditorial advisory board members that includes three Nobel Laureates(helping to lend further credibility to their publication efforts); strongsupport among the organic chemistry community; and very competitivepricing (75% below the primary competitor) were reported. From aneconomic standpoint, the ACS investment and risk is expected to takeseven years to break even. The initial publishing amount far exceededwhat was originally anticipated. For example, during the year 2000, itpublished 4,268 pages instead of the originally planned 2,912 pages. Anarticle addressing this project entitled, “Journal Wars,” was publishedin the May 12, 2001 issue of The Economist. The ACS’s second publi-cation project, Crystal Growth & Design was launched in January 2001.Its online functionality was similar to that of Organic Letters but withadditional innovations that included embedded files within articles todisplay graphics (e.g., molecular visualizations and quick-time mov-ies). Journals were priced on average 80% below their primary competi-tor. Bovenschulte repeated that is was still too soon to thoroughly assessresults.

Bovenschulte speculated on SPARC’s impact on scholarly publish-ing based on their early findings. SPARC has aided in significant ame-lioration of price increases among commercial publishers; significantacceleration of timely online availability of new issues; innovation; andin helping develop an increasing awareness among faculty of the conse-quences of high journal prices. In his concluding remarks, Bovenschultecommented on current and future pricing models for Web access. Theapproach taken by most STM publishers has been the historical model


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based on print subscriptions. The goal to protect publishing revenuesstill has to be taken into account, including long-term fairness andsustainability. There is a perceived need to unbundle print and Webpricing as well as a need to remove disincentives for canceling print.The usage models are still in a transitional phase. They are fair in princi-ple but nonetheless continue to be problematic. At present, there is nogood option for satisfying the majority of customers.

The large investment involved in creating digital back files andmaintaining archives is hard to justify, due to quality control problems,particularly when one considers usage and demand by discipline remainuncertain. Cost recovery is necessary whether direct or indirect. ACSgovernance is presently working on a policy for access to online files.

Many queries and comments following the talks focused on ques-tions surrounding usage models, pricing models, end-user needs, andhow revolutionary it feels to be in this transitional period of scholarlycommunication publishing. Participants had a unique opportunity togain an overview, as well as a deeper understanding, of the various re-form initiatives made by leaders in development. Responsive alterna-tives to current publishing vehicles made by scholarly societies,universities, university presses, and libraries in direct response to theeconomic crisis and timely scholarly needs provided the fodder neces-sary for a particularly lively program.

Taemin Kim ParkIndiana University

Bloomington, IN

Michelle SitkoMarywood University

Scranton, PA

SYSTEM MIGRATION: ISSUES FOR CATALOG MANAGEMENT.A REPORT OF THE ALCTS CCS CATALOG MANAGEMENTDISCUSSION GROUP MEETING. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSO-CIATION ANNUAL MEETING, SAN FRANCISCO, JUNE 2001

The ALCTS CCS Catalog Management Discussion Group met inSan Francisco on Saturday, June 16, 2001 to discuss the topic of systemmigration and its implications for catalog management and authority


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control. The discussion was preceded by two presentations. JimLeBlanc (Cornell University) and Robert Freeborn (Pennsylvania StateUniversity) presented the challenges that their respective institutionsfaced during recent system migrations. These issues included securingthe integrity of data from one system to another, index mapping, and theuse of authority control or other vendors during the migration.

Jim LeBlanc, Database Management and Authorities Librarian atCornell University, discussed Cornell’s migration from a NOTIS sys-tem, which was brought up in 1988, to Endeavor’s Voyager system in2000. Cornell’s collection includes six million volumes, and four mil-lion titles. Many of the Endeavor employees were NOTIS veterans,which made the migration easier.

Robert Freeborn, Music/AV Cataloger and co-chair of the SIRSIUnicorn Cataloging Workflow Implementation Committee at Pennsyl-vania State University, presented on what he called “the art of cat herd-ing,” Penn State’s migration from a largely homegrown, non-integratedsystem to SIRSI’s Unicorn system. Penn State had developed its own li-brary system in the late 1970s and had used that along with Innovac foracquisitions and a separate system, ICP (Inventory Control Program)for circulation, for the past 20 years. This presented many challengesduring the system migration, as much information had to integrated be-fore the final migration of data to Unicorn.

Both LeBlanc and Freeborn stressed how important both testing andpre-migration cleanup are. Cornell University and Pennsylvania StateUniversity each performed a significant amount of testing before the fi-nal loads of data. As far as catalog management issues are concerned,much of the testing revolved around three areas: bibliographic data,holdings data, and authorities. Cornell did considerable testing of fixedfield values and recruited employees to examine records in their spe-cialized areas, e.g., music catalogers looked at music records. Cornell’stesting team included approximately 20 cataloging and authorities staff,and they tested approximately 900 test conditions with three examplesof each. Penn State also performed significant testing on their system,with particular attention to loading of bibliographic data and merginginformation from the three non-integrated modules into Unicorn.

Pre-migration cleanup is another area in which both Cornell andPenn State invested a good bit of time. Cornell found that it was neces-sary to resolve problems in three areas before the final migration of datainto Voyager: local notes in 590 fields had to be moved to MARC hold-ings local notes fields, obsolete values, such as indicators in the 260fields had to be deleted, and values in fixed fields had to be corrected.


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Penn State found that they had to delete certain characters (e.g., pipecharacters) that had been used in non-standard ways. Penn State alsohad to clean up certain holdings conventions that had been developed inthe local system, but which would be misinterpreted when those hold-ings were migrated to MARC holdings records. A third clean-up effort atPenn State included adding linking fields to all circulating serials recordsso that the acquisitions order record could be linked to the bibliographic rec-ord when they were integrated in Unicorn.

A third area that both Cornell and Penn State addressed was the man-agement of authority control and how the migration affected that activ-ity. LeBlanc reported that the migration allowed Cornell to move fromvendor-supplied to local authority control. Penn State’s situation wasdifferent in that while authority heading maintenance had been done ona regular basis, their original system did not have authority control. Thisprecipitated the decision to outsource authority control to OCLC/WLN.This also provided the opportunity to do more pre-migration databasecleanup than would have been possible otherwise.

In conclusion, it is clear from the two presentations and the ensuingdiscussion that it is essential to perform significant amounts of testingand pre-migration cleanup before any system migration. Some ques-tions that institutions should consider before migrating should includewhat can be done in-house, what can be outsourced, and what can behandled by the new system.

Rebecca L. MugridgePennsylvania State University Libraries

University Park, PA

With assistance from

Linda G. GabelMetadata Services Division, OCLC, Inc.

Dublin, OH

BLACKWELL’S ONLINE BOOKSHOP NOW IN US VERSION

Blackwell’s Book Services recently introduced Blackwell’s OnlineBookshop (BOB) in a US version. The British version of Blackwell’sOnline Bookshop was established in the UK in 1995, and gained a fol-lowing among academic and scholarly readers in the United States.


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BOB in its US version enables customers to purchase both US and UKtitles through the online bookshop. Blackwell’s unique tie between theUK and US academic communities gives BOB’s bibliographic catalogdepth and comprehensiveness.

BOB is a comprehensive source for scholarly titles, out-of-printbooks, popular titles, and resources created expressly for the academiccommunity. BOB enables users to search the book catalog online, readreviews, add titles to a personal e-bookshelf, place orders, and pay witha credit card. Academic librarians and other institutional customershave the option of establishing a Blackwell’s account as an alternativeto credit card purchasing. Simple registration, sophisticated ordering,and rush delivery all combine to make Blackwell’s Online Bookshopparticularly attractive to academic librarians.

“Our aim is to deliver an online bookshop which integrates all thefeatures and functionality users have come to expect of an Internetbookseller, along with the professional service and traditional expertiseBlackwell’s customers across the globe associate with our name,” saysMartha Whittaker, vice president of Marketing and Sales for Blackwell’sBook Services.

The BOB US site (http://www.bookshop.blackwell.com) is able tosupply titles that librarians and faculty need with the added benefit ofrush service and institutional purchasing account support. BOB’s func-tionality has the power to search for titles across disciplines and subjectareas, so locating books for order is quick and efficient. The BOB ordertracker allows anyone to check the status of their order at any time dur-ing the process, so librarians can see if their payment has been pro-cessed, if the book has been picked, and when it ships. The BOB US sitereflects Blackwell’s ongoing commitment to investing in and furtherdeveloping their online systems to serve their academic customers tothe fullest.

Matt Nauman, Director of Marketing and Publisher Relations forBlackwell’s, notes, “Our mission is to provide wide access to scholarlymaterials for the entire academic community . . . to make it easy for ourcustomers to access the information they need, when and how they needit. BOB US is one more way that we prove our commitment to servingthe academic community.”

For more information about Blackwell’s Book Services, visit thecompany website at www.blackwell.com. To learn more about BOBUS or to order online, please visit the new bookshop site at http://bookshop.blackwell.com.


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CLIR PUBLISHES WHITE PAPER ON E-JOURNAL USAGESTATISTICS

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has pub-lished a white paper on electronic journal usage statistics by Judy Lu-ther, president of the consulting firm Informed Strategies. The reportexamines why it has been difficult to obtain statistics on electronic jour-nal usage, and reveals librarians’ and publishers’ concerns with respectto the generation of usage statistics. The paper suggests a context forfurther discussion between the providers and consumers of electronicjournals.

Fewer than half of the publishers of electronic journals currently gen-erate statistics on usage for librarians. The reason is not a simple matterof publishers being unwilling to provide such information, even thoughsome complain that implementing a data collection function is costlyand others fear that librarians will cancel subscriptions if usage is low.A more basic problem is that there is no agreement on how to producedata that can be compared and analyzed. It has been difficult for librari-ans to know what to ask for when something as basic as the term “use”can have many meanings. Librarians and publishers must work togetherin solving the problem.

The white paper reveals that publishers and librarians share a signifi-cant number of concerns besides a lack of comparable or complete us-age data. They worry about the lack of context for understanding data,the lack of certainty about effective economic models, and the complex-ity of issues related to user privacy.

According to the report, publishers who have begun to supply librari-ans with the needed data have not found that librarians are cancelingsubscriptions. In fact, publishers who have developed the capability tocollect and analyze statistics for libraries are using this capability to cre-ate data for their own applications.

The author notes that, currently, “associations involved in creatingstandards and guidelines on data collection are focused on defining thedata elements and determining what is currently being done. No one isworking directly with the publishers who have developed the data, un-derstand the variables, and are in a position to provide guidance.” Be-cause it is a period of discovery for both librarians and publishers, theauthor recommends that a forum be held at which invited representa-tives from the publisher, vendor, and library communities could ad-vance the dialog about generating data that can be compared.


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The White Paper on Electronic Journal Usage Statistics is availableon CLIR’s Web site, www.clir.org. Print copies are also available for$15 per copy through the Web site.

THE INVISIBLE WEB

Information Today, Inc. has recently published The Invisible Web:Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t See, by ChrisSherman and Gary Price.

The authors estimate that 80 percent or more of the authoritative infor-mation accessible over the Internet is invisible to search engines, and thusnot readily available to the millions of computer users who use the Webfor research. According to Sherman and Price, content-rich databasesfrom universities, libraries, associations, businesses, and governmentsare appearing on Web servers around the world at a staggering rate, butthe current generation of search engines can reveal little or nothing aboutthe data they contain. The phenomenon has been referred to as “The In-visible Web,” and it is a major obstacle for online searchers.

The Invisible Web is a handbook and directory for information userswho wish to utilize Invisible Web resources systematically in order toimprove the quality and effectiveness of their online research. In thisbook Sherman and Price describe the scope and background of theproblem, introduce readers to essential sites and sources, and offer prac-tical tips, techniques, and analysis. The Web directory the authors havecreated to support the book (www.invisible-web.net) provides updates,news, and links to over 1,000 Invisible Web resources.

The Invisible Web is a CyberAge Book from Information Today, Inc.(ITI), and is available for $29.95.

REPORT EXAMINES MODEL FOR SHARED REPOSITORY

A new report from the Council on Library and Information Re-sources (CLIR) looks at the economic and logistical issues associatedwith creating a shared library depository. Entitled A Collaborative Ap-proach to Collection Storage: The Five College Library Depository, thereport is based on the efforts of the Five Colleges, Inc. (Amherst Col-lege, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, andthe University of Massachusetts at Amherst) to create a shared reposi-tory. The arrangement is unusual in that each institution has agreed to


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deaccession duplicate copies and adopt joint ownership of the remain-ing collection.

Despite the promise of electronic technologies to alleviate space con-straints, academic and research libraries continue to accumulate printmaterials at an unprecedented rate and are running out of room. The cre-ation of off-site storage facilities has eased the situation for many insti-tutions, and some have even decided to create shared repositories. Inagreeing to adopt joint ownership of the collection, members of the FiveColleges, Inc. have taken the next step.

The promise of joint ownership is appealing. Institutions candeaccession duplicate copies of less-used works without jeopardizing ac-cess (unwanted duplicates will be donated to other libraries). The com-bined holdings will provide a richer resource for all. There is a greatpotential for cost savings. But there are also significant potential pitfalls.How did the Five Colleges agreement come about? What were the chal-lenges? Author Willis Bridegam, director of the Amherst College Li-brary, answers these questions, providing an overview of the advantages,disadvantages, costs, and politics of creating the Five College LibraryDepository. In addition to offering a valuable case study in practical mat-ters, the report suggests a means by which libraries can emphasize theirroles as service centers, rather than merely item repositories.

A Collaborative Approach to Collection Storage: The Five CollegeLibrary Depository is available on CLIR’s Web site, www.clir.org.

MOVING THEORY INTO PRACTICE: DIGITAL IMAGING FORLIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES

Moving Theory into Practice, recently published by Research Li-braries Group (RLG), is written to aid institutions that choose to refor-mat cultural resources to digital image form.

This book is a timely and valuable reference for funders, managers, li-brarians, archivists, curators, system analysts, programmers, administra-tors, faculty, and other scholars. It focuses on an interdependent circle ofconsiderations associated with digital imaging programs in cultural ap-plications, advocating an integrated approach to digital imaging pro-grams–from selection to access to preservation. It addresses issues ofconcern to many key players and stakeholders in imaging initiatives.

Moving Theory into Practice provides guidance in a complex arena,bringing to bear the contributions of more than 50 experts. Throughout


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the book, sidebars highlight major issues, point out pertinent researchtrends, and identify relevant emerging technologies and techniques.From decision-making, to sound practices, to turning projects into sus-tainable digital programs, Moving Theory into Practice provides awealth of balanced information and counsel.

The world’s intellectual and experiential record, from early historythrough the end of the 20th century, exists, where it survives, almost en-tirely in written or print form. This wealth of material has been and con-tinues to be collected and held for the ages by libraries, archives, andmuseums. The growth of the World Wide Web and related digital tech-nologies presents a new, universal medium for research and communica-tions of all kinds. But the Internet will not be the global agora forresearch, teaching, and scholarship without awareness and use of materi-als created before the digital age.

Librarians and archivists, who were pioneer users of computers, net-working, the Internet, and the Web to create and share digital catalogingand access points to their collections, now have a new challenge: integrat-ing the use of older cultural resources into the online realm of 21st cen-tury inquiry.

Through wise selection, digital conversion, and integration of such re-sources into the collections so readily available to users over the Web, li-brarians, archivists, and their partners in these efforts are pursuing morethan a technical goal. Digitized resources facilitate use and are accessibleworldwide. They–and the cross-references they may carry–revivify inthe reader’s mind the presence of more relevant materials than just thoseon the Web. They may be part of a coordinated preservation program formaterials in danger of loss through deterioration. And they contribute tothe growing value of digital image collections, forming new institutionalassets and enabling future uses beyond their original purpose.

Moving Theory into Practice, by Anne R. Kenney and Oya Y.Rieger, is available from the Research Libraries Group for $80.00.

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BUILD AND SUSTAIN COLLECTIONSOF “FREE” WEB RESOURCES?

There is a growing body of material on the Web that is of value tohigher education and research and can be accessed for free. But the no-tion of free access can mask a range of hidden and long-term costs asso-ciated with developing and managing collections of Web-basedresources.


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What are the costs and other considerations? Can third-party Web re-sources serve as a pillar of a sustainable digital library? Author LouisPitschmann provides some answers to this question in a new reportfrom the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and the Council on Libraryand Information Resources (CLIR), entitled Building Sustainable Col-lections of Free Third-Party Web Resources.

Mr. Pitschmann, the incoming dean of libraries at the University ofAlabama, begins his report by underscoring the valuable service that li-braries can offer in making high-quality Web-based resources accessi-ble to their patrons–as they have done for years in the print realm. Hecautions, however, that third-party public domain Web resources arefundamentally different from scholarly print and analog formats, andthat “developing collections of free Web resources is a process that re-quires its own set of practices, policies, and organizational models.”

The author identifies and synthesizes current practices for develop-ing collections of free third-party Internet resources that support highereducation and research. More than a third of the report is devoted toidentifying, evaluating, and selecting material–from establishing prov-enance and rights legitimacy to assessing the ease of navigation and as-suring site integrity. He then addresses questions of resource discoveryand adding value through cataloging, metadata, and search functions.There are sections on data management (including preservation), use offoreign-language sites, user support, and organizational and financialissues. The report concludes with some thoughts about how libraries inthe future will acquire and manage the rapidly growing body ofWeb-based information.

The report is the first in a series that will focus on challenges in digi-tal collection development. Forthcoming works will examine the use ofcommercial electronic content and the use of digital collections createdfrom library holdings.

Building Sustainable Collections of Free Third-Party Web Re-sources is available on CLIR’s Web site at http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub98/pub98.pdf. Print copies are available for orderingthrough the Web site.


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technical services report

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