>> Tom Scheinfeldt: Okay, we'll get started.
I think we're running already a little bit behind time, so I don't want to take too much
time away.
I'm Tom Scheinfeldt from the University of Connecticut, and I'm very pleased to be here
today introducing this great panel.
On the screen now is a Twitter conversation that I had last evening in the airport with
one of our panelists, and I was thinking about the meanings of interoperability for this
panel, and James tweeted back that, he said, um, I've got an interoperability power point,
if needed, but I think I'm supposed to talk about sustainability, and I tried to reassure
him, tweeting back saying, nope, I'm thinking about interoperability as a component of sustainability,
and he wrote back, that almost makes it sound as if wasting scarce resources isn't a good
idea, and I told him that he just gave me my opening line, so there it is, but I think
there's a serious truth in this joking exchange, and I think we heard some of that in the last
panel, that interoperability, I think, really is our clearest path to a sustainable cultural
heritage and public information infrastructure, and, so, whether that interoperability is
about federated search and discovery or linked open data or open source software or consortial
revenue models, the things we'll hear from our panelists today, building the national
digital platform is ultimately about sustaining local investments, and I think that's where
we get to some of the concerns that were voiced in the question and answer in the last period,
the critique, I think, that's been levied against this idea of the national digital
platform is that it runs the risk, as I think Amy and Brewster both hinted at, of isolating
and alienating local institutions and neglecting their needs in pursuit of some larger national
all encompassing vision and program, but I think that critique will only prove correct
if we focus too much emphasis on the first word in the program, the national, and not
enough emphasis on the third word, platform, and ultimately, the national digital platform
will succeed only if by creating an interoperable ecosystem, we heard that word, ecosystem of
tools, serves, data and organizations, that is a platform, only if that platform allows
local institutions to avoid the kind of giant resource suck of digital services and tools,
services and tools that could be better provided at a distance, and instead focus their resources,
their energy, their staff expertise on the things that can only be done locally.
So, I don't think it's an either/or, I think it's allowing local institutions to do what
they do best and allowing a national ecosystem or shared ecosystem, and maybe national is
the problem word there, maybe we want to talk more about a shared infrastructure or shared
platform or shared ecosystem, allowing that shared ecosystem to do the work that can be
done by us all, and, so, it really is an issue of sustainability.
It's about allowing local institutions to use their resources best and not duplicate
effort.
For digital programs, that may be really outside of their scope, outside of their resources,
outside of their expertise.
So, I think that keeping our eye on this most important goal of the national digital platform,
kind of local cultural sustainability, is our real challenge here today, and I think
that was voiced very well in the last session.
And so, we're going to hear from each of our panelists this morning, their responses to
that challenge and how they're meeting those challenges in different ways.
So, let me introduce them quickly.
I was told just to do names and titles, so I'll do that.
Dan Cohen, immediately to my right, is executive director of the Digital Public Library of
America.
I think everyone here probably knows what that does.
Evelyn McLellan is president of Artifactual Systems which develops open source archival
products including Archive Matica and Atom.
Sibyl Schaefer is digital preservation analyst at the University of California San Diego,
and until recently, was head of digital programs at the Rockefeller Archive Center, and James
Shulman is president of Art Store, an organization that provides content, tools, services to
over 1500 colleges, universities and other institutions around the world.
So, with that, I'll let this panel get started and turn it over to Dan.
>>Dan Cohen: Thanks so much, Tom.
It’s god to be here with Tom.
Last week, the New Yorker had an article on NASA's preparation for a human landing on
Mars, which is supposed to take place sometime in the 2030's, hopefully I’ll still be alive
and it's, of course, a huge undertaking, but what the article focused on was what it would
take to get a half dozen humans there and back, and this is the important point, without
killing each other.
Now, of course, you know, two decades from now, many things will change.
Engineering will change over the next two decades, but I thought what NASA astrobiologist
Christopher McKay said was really important, that technology is surely going to change,
but there will be the same humans as we have now, and that struck me as extremely profound.
The engineering will change, the technology will change, but the human beings will remain
the same.
You know, thanks to IMLS, we stand here talking about the national digital platform, which
is really a transformative idea.
I mean, I think it is, in fact, the Martian landing for libraries, archives and museums
in the United States.
It's a very powerful and exciting idea, and the technology that relates to that platform
will indeed change over time, but the humans will remain the same, and it's a belief that
I really do wake up with every day working at the Digital Public Library of America which
I always say is as much a social construction as it is a technical one.
We launched two years ago.
We just celebrated our second birthday, and we're working really at scale across the country.
We've made tremendous progress in the engineering and in the collaboration.
We just surpassed 10 million openly available items from 1600 contributing institutions,
so we're really at a very gratifying point here two years in, but I think what's most
gratifying about it is in fact some of these human factors.
I think collaboration is incredibly hard.
It's hard for us not to kill each other and to be oppositional with each other.
You know, James Neal cautioned against polygamy, I believe, on the last panel, and what I would
say is DPLA isn't polygamist, but we are polyamorous, and, so, we want to, in fact, engage a community
and have community input.
DPLA fast in Indianapolis last week, we had 350 people there, librarians, museum professionals,
archivists, yes, archivists were there, we had members of the public, historians, scholars,
so many different kinds of people there, and I think that that community, the fact that
this exists now in 2015 is, I think, in fact, the most important thing that DPLA has been
able to substantiate.
Having said that, of course there are important engineering challenges, and there are things
related to the hubs that are important.
Excuse me, related to DPLA that are important in terms of the model.
We do have, in fact, a decentralized model.
We are not consolidating to use Brewster Kale’s ominous word.
We're instead creating, I think Tom’s word, an ecosystem, where we have hubs across the
United States, especially state based service hubs, that act as little mini DPLA's in their
state to bring online the small collections.
We don't want to forget about the small places, as Tom noted, but to bring them all together,
and we've been very fortunate to get funding from IMLS and National Endowment to the Humanities
and the Sloan Foundation and the Knight Foundation and others to spin up these local hubs so
we can in fact have a collaborative decentralized model that all works together.
So, we're pleased with the progress, but there's clearly much more to do, and I think, here,
engineering is important.
You know, as astronauts are fond of saying, leaky spaceships are sub optimal.
They don't say that, but I'm saying that.
I’m sure they say that at some point.
So, how can we make the engineering, I guess, more safer?
Safer for humans, more easy to use so that people don't in fact kill each other?
Here, I think what we're trying to do at least here at DPLA is many of the things that have
already been laid out on the table.
We want to make sure that there are parallel systems in the ecosystem, we want people to
have local variations, but we want them to work together and to be interoperable.
We want to make the work flows better.
Mark Matienza, our director of technology, is here, and he and his team are really working
on streamlining all the processes that relate to digital platforms, how the data gets interchanged
with each other, how we normalize data across multiple institutions.
We need to have that all work together.
Internationally, we want that to all work together.
We also want things to be modular.
A lot of our code bases are extremely modular, where people can make changes, can work on
little bits of it, but again, have it work together in a very webby way.
Again, not consolidation but collaboration in an ecosystem.
Others in the room are doing important work.
I'm delighted to see so many collaborators.
In fact, most of the people in the room I think we are collaborating with.
If you're not collaborating with us, dan@dpla you can send me an e mail, and we're excited
to work with you more in the future to share our cultural heritage in a maximal way with
the public.
Thanks.
>>Evelyn McLellan: Okay, yes, I'm Evelyn McLellan from Artifactual Systems, and my background
is in the open source software development community, specifically archive managment
so I'm going to be speaking a lot from my own experience.
The last few years have seen phenomenal growth in the number and sophistication of open source
software tools that are available for libraries and archives, and I realized when I started
preparing for this meeting that I actually have a very hard time keeping a handle on
everything that's out there, so to help me prepare, I went to the excellent FOS for Live
site, that free and open source software hosted by Nerasis which is dedicated to listing available
open source software tools and providing updates on releases.
That site lists a total of 223 open source software tools for use by libraries, which
is an astonishing number, and from my perspective, as an Archive Matica project participant,
there are actually a lot more open source tools out there that we integrate into the
Archive Matica suite that aren't necessarily for stand alone use in libraries and archives.
So, this is an astonishing number, but it made me think, you know, how many institutions
are actually successfully preserving their digital holdings and making them available
online, and I'm thinking libraries and archives here.
I may sound like I'm about to provide an answer to this, but actually, I'm not.
I have no idea, and I'm not sure exactly how I would find out, and I guess a related question
is this; for those institutions successfully undertaking these tasks, what percentage of
their digital holdings are they managing to preserve and provide access to, and my belief
based on anecdotal evidence is that there's an awful lot of digitized content that is
not adequately preserved and that born digital content is being acquired at a sometimes alarming
rate, but is neither being preserved or made accessible.
So, I've been asked to comment on what makes for a successful open source project or service,
and here, I'm going to fall back on my personal experience a little bit.
The first thing is functionality, which sounds like a no brainer, the software's got to work
and it's got to fill a need.
Speaking as someone in software development, I can tell you it’s actually very difficult
to figure out what exactly it is the users need and what the software should do.
It's not that easy.
The second thing is a long range plan for supporting and continuing to develop the software,
and I think in the past, we've seen some grant funded projects where there's been a tool
produced, but when the grant ends, the project kind of goes away.
Software requires an unbelievable amount of TLC just to keep going.
The third thing is community support and documentation and the importance and enormity of this task
cannot be understated.
At Artifactual, I find that we're often just a little bit behind on our documentation that
we provide for our software, and sometimes a lot behind.
We put all of our end user documentation and all of our technical documentation online,
and it requires a great deal of effort just to keep that up to date.
We also run two public discussion lists, one for Archive Matica and one for Atom, and we
try to encourage users of these lists to answer each other's questions, but we find that we
end up answering quite a few of the questions.
Users come there for technical support or to ask questions about functionality, and
we end up answering the questions, and particularly when it comes to Archive Matica, which it's
kind of a technical and esoteric field.
The fourth thing that a successful project requires is the implementation of standards
so that the content being preserved and made accessible can be moved between systems or
integrated into link data platforms and initiatives.
We had one institution tell us they didn't actually care that Archive Matica was open
source, what they cared about was the premise and implementation and the use of the Library
of Congress specification so, this kind of brings me to my fifth point, which is integration
of systems, and we've started to talk a little bit about that.
No single software tool does everything, and just because, I should add, just because a
software tool is open source doesn't necessarily mean it's interoperable with other systems,
open source or not.
It actually takes a lot of effort to make two systems talk to each other.
We're doing a project currently with the University of Michigan, the Bentley Library there, to
integrate Archive Matica with Archive Space and D Space and one of the things we're very
heavily focused on for that project is making sure that the tools integrate not just in
a way that meets their processing needs, but in a way that can be used by other institutions,
and they're working very hard to talk to other institutions and find out, you know, how would
you use archive space and Archive Matica together, what would you be looking for, and finally,
my last point is that there are two kinds of institutions out there, and I'm about to
get a red flag here.
There are two kinds of institutions out there, and I guess this is my take away point.
There's institutions that are big and can afford to put developer resources into supporting
and developing open source tools, integrating them themselves, but there are a lot of institutions
that just need to be consumers of these services and tools, and we have to focus efforts on
both the large institutions and the smaller institutions that need these tools.
>>Sibyl Schaefer: Hi.
Can you put the—yes, thank you.
As Tom mentioned, I'm currently working at the University of California San Diego, which
as you may know, is a very large institution.
That's a fairly recent development.
I was asked to join this conversation while I was the head of digital programs of the
Rockefeller Archive Center, which is a very small independent archive located about 20
miles north of Manhattan and it's from that smaller organizational perspective that I'll
be kind of representing today.
As head of digital programs, I implemented many software programs to aid in our care
and management of archival materials, digital archival materials in particular, and our
work flow looks something like this.
We would receive the materials, whether on some sort of media in which we would image
it or through data transfer, there was descriptive processes that were undertaken, including
identifying potentially restricted material and personal identifiable information.
The materials were then packaged for preservation, distributed geographically for redundancy,
and then provided access to whether that be online or on site.
I brought this diagram up not so much to dig into the details but to show that there's
over seven different systems that we use to process records from excess to access.
We chose many of these systems mainly because they had the specific functionality we needed,
and we also favored ones that were either more user friendly or could be configured
to be user friendly.
Being an agency dedicated to preserving the study of philanthropy, open source systems
always jived more with our ethos, however, if proprietary software had the functionality
we needed, we weren't precluded from adopting it, and it's worth noting that these are proprietary
systems, and there’s a couple on the diagram are expensive and thus not readily available
to organizations with smaller budgets.
The most important aspect of this diagram is really the arrows connecting the systems.
This is where we spent most of our time.
Interoperability, and more specifically, the ability to control data flow from one application
to another is an area of high need as has already been stated here today.
This diagram obscures a ton of work in between each point, some of which we were able to
automate, some of which we were not.
This type of convoluted work flow is not unique to the archive center.
One tweet from the IMLS focus Twitter conversation the other week sums it up as there's no sensible
way to do accessing, digitization, and preservation redaction.
Another aspect of this diagram I'd like to point out is the one way work flow.
Revisioning is so nightmarish that we haven't yet had a use case that passed the threshold
where it was warranted.
This will change, however, once some of our time based access embargoes are lifted and
the materials need to be made accessible.
The diagram also doesn't include our subscription to archive it and to the web data we collect,
mainly because it hasn't yet been figured into the work flow, but I think it's important
to recognize that the data is coming in from a lot of different sources.
So, addressing the questions that we were given prior to this meeting when talking about
OSS, and taking it to the next level, interoperability is number one on my wish list.
I think IMLS could lead the way in bringing together the organizations that are working
with OSS in order to learn about each other, foster collaboration and innovation and discuss
the next step in bringing these systems more in sync.
The other thing I wanted to highlight was how I determined the division of resources
amongst all the programs we use.
My staff was pretty small, there were four of us in total, but I had a great deal of
flexibility in allocating funds for software and software services.
One of my goals was to build staff technical competency.
So, in deciding between allocating time or allocating money, a large part of that decision
was influenced by the ecosystem surrounding the OSS and how its development community
supported newbies.
The software projects that promoted the most support and active encouragement from my staff
were the ones that we chose to actively work with and adopt.
Another recommendation is to provide support for development of guidelines or best practices
for how open source software makers should communicate to their variant constituencies.
Thanks.
>>James Shulman: I am physiologically incapable of speaking without pictures.
I can do shadow puppets.
I will start, maybe they can help us find my presentation.
What I want to do today is talk about, I'm going to talk about, I can’t read that so
I’m going to go to this.
I’m going to talk about sort of the arc of reforming isolationist.
It's not really fair, since what we've been doing at Art Store really has been about being
networked all along, but I think what I'm going to talk about are a few projects that
we've done that show a path toward an increasingly networked approach to things, and I think,
so our original mission and our original goal was to set out to connect content owners and
educational users and create content that would be useful to bring together and aggregate
content that would be useful for people teaching art history or other related fields using
visual materials, so we found images from archives and museums and individual scholars
and photographers all over the world and brought them together and made them searchable, and
just to highlight one thing that Amy Garmer said on the previous panel, the need to integrate
the local into this networked approach is a very important sociological and ethical
issue, so I think all the things that we've talked about today, about the diversity of
the ecosystem, are so important, and I think what Sibyl was just saying about the different
pieces of this, some of these are proprietor software, some are open, but the glue that
we're talking about today and that IMLS is providing such leadership in doing is seeing
that that glue in that ecosystem needs to all work together, and so I think that’s
why we’ve heard the work ecosystem a couple of times.
So, what we did originally, so I'm going to give three examples of how things that we've
done at Art Store, even though everything we do is non profit but some of them charge
fees, how those have cross subsidized open things and I think the increasing utility
of those over time.
So, the first example, Art Store digitally library subscribed to by 1600 institutions,
from research universities to small public schools.
So, through that channel where we were bringing together content and making it available for
educational users as a subscription service, the metropolitan museum came to us about 5
or 6 years ago and said we want to make images available for academic publishing.
For free, we want to provide images for low print run publications, will you do the fulfillment
of that for us, and we said absolutely.
So, we use this platform, this channel that we were building to deliver online educational
uses for very constrained purposes, to open it up to allow for this academic, this distribution.
They're images that they wanted to give away to no fee, and we give away for no fee and
you don’t have to subscribe to Art Store.
So, already, the platform of Art Store digital library is cross subsidizing this open content.
That's great, but to be honest, it's a little bit of an orphan.
It's not in the flow, it's not in a national platform, so it's a really good thing, and
I urge you all to go get an image for your article for the Burlington Magazine, but it's
not in the flow.
The next stage, so anyway, the way that works though is you get a password, and you go to
Art Store, we give you a password, you get those images, you can fill out a form and
download a 20 megabyte TIF for an academic publication.
The next example we have is we've also built a platform called Shared Shelf, which is cloud
based cataloging and asset management services, and so this is really built in response to
the silos within institutions where one department uses one software and the map department uses
another and the art history uses another and the archaeologist uses another, and individual
faculty members are storing their collections on iPhoto or wherever and these images aren't
getting into the institutional flow or into a shared flow.
So, this is hopefully useful services for colleges and universities, and there are about
120 places using it, has a lot of more on metadata and authority files and the whole
vocabulary is built in, and so, a couple years ago, Columbia University and the Abrial Library
and Jim and his colleague Carolyn Ann Vabian worked together with us and the Getty Research
Institute and got an IMLS grant to build something called the Built Works Registry.
The Built Works Registry is an open, messy, sloppy, beginnings of an authority file for
Built Works, so that everybody in the world—let’s skip this—everybody in the world isn’t
trying to figure out is it called Falling Water or Water, or is it health man house
in mill run of bear run Pennsylvania and so it was to build one record, one stable URI.
This, of course, is open, but it lives symbiotically on the shared shelf platform.
So, this, too, this has now been launched and it's up, it has an API, so it's a big
step forward toward being in the flow.
Where we fit vocabularies and authorities in this national platform, I think, is still
emerging, but this was a step for us where that cross subsidization was now trying to
get things more in the flow.
So, this is BW, the Bell Worth Registry.
So the newest stage for us was when DPLA launched and we became a hub for it early on, and so
we worked with some museums that wanted their content that was in the Art Store digital
library to get in this flow.
The bridges that were built in those early days weren't made out of steel, they were
more rope ladders, so fortunately with a new IMLS grant, we're going to be building out
the infrastructure, and we're going to work on standards, like Triple IF and work towards
Hydra interoperability so that all the things, so that this flow of content entity into DPLA
is very much now moving more and more towards the arc of fitting into this national ecosystem.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: Okay, thank you all.
That was great, and I guess, Trevor, I'll start the Q & A. One thing that stood out
for me about all of your presentations was not so much the focus on, I think as Dan setup
very well, not so much the focus on technology, but the focus on people, so we're talking
about what's the best word, you know, should we be using ecosystem, platform, cyber infrastructure,
you know, which of these words is most appropriate.
You know, I think we could also say that it's people, right?
It's like, you know, the national digital platform is made of people, and it seems that,
you know, Dan, you were talking about the kind of organizational challenges of getting
all of your partners together and working together to form that kind of community.
Evelyn, you were talking about the importance of the community to provide documentation,
support, kind of help functions, and, Sibyl, you were talking about the kind of idiosyncrasies
that all institutions have in their processes, and, you know, in some respects, I think we
want to support those kinds of idiosyncrasies, and this gets back to some of the issues,
I think, that we were talking about in the last panel.
I'm wondering if anybody has anything to say about how, while we build this national digital
platform, we can continue to support the kind of idiosyncratic, because I think that is,
I mean, the richness of our field is really in the idiosyncrasies of individual institutions,
of individual practitioners, of individual collections, and, so, while we try to collaborate
and work together and interoperate, how we can, at the same time, support idiosyncrasy.
>>Michael Edson: I've got an idea.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: Mike, you want to jump?
Mike will jump in and answer my question.
>>Michael Edson: See me during the break.
I'm Michael Edson.
I work at the Smithsonian, but I'm here for Clear where I am a fellow in the Open Knowledge
Foundation.
Trevor and I have talked for years about the process of edge to core.
So, back in the old days, if you wanted something cool to happen in your organization, you'd
put down the gates and you'd do a retreat and get the smart people in the room, and
you'd define the problem, you’d architect the solution, your staff would build it, and
then you'd deliver it to a passive and grateful public, and that doesn't work anymore, because
kind of the perimeter of the innovation environment is so freaking huge now, it dwarfs the scale
of almost any institution we can think of, so, when we architected the Smithsonian strategy
back in 2009, we tried to turn that into an asset.
We said the most interesting things in any given domain are happening in the border habitat,
between institutions in the 20th century sense and everybody else in the world.
That's where it happens in nature, that's where you get the most biodiversity, and those
border habitats are where you have well defined problems which normally come from people.
Some subject matter expertise, some technological prowess, and some level of platform with a
lower case P, and so the process for an organization like digital platform at IMLS or any of our
institutions, if you want to make something interesting happen, is to diversify your portfolio
of attention away from exclusive focus on your own stuff and more towards that border
habitat, and you develop the process of scanning the edge for the solutions that are cropping
up naturally.
If you all read Without Their Permission, by Alexis Ohanian it talks about permission
less innovation being faster and more potent than industrial innovation.
So, the process is edge to core.
Devote some number of human hours and focus and attention and mind share of this project
to scanning that perimeter, relieving the edge innovators of the burden of supporting
their own platform of keeping HR and Payroll and their own teams going, bringing the aspects
that can be successful into the middle where they can scale and then release the hounds,
you know, encourage the rest of that ecosystem to keep going.
That's going to move faster than anything.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: So, let me throw this back to the panel.
We've got several people on the panel who are supporting kind of some core institutions
or core infrastructure of the national digital platform, the DPLA, archive management, Archive
Matica, Art Store, these are, I think we’d all agree, kind of core components of the
national digital platform.
How, as kind of core, central components are your institutions, your projects, doing that
work of scanning the periphery for good work, for inspiration, for innovation, for contribution
and supporting that richness at the nose?
>>James Shulman: So, I'm reminded of Josh Greenburg's dissertation, where he wrote about
how you need translators, and if you're living in the borders, you need people who can speak
both languages, and, so, obviously, that's very practical in terms of standards.
We all think in those terms, but just in terms of respecting cultures and being able to translate,
and, so, we work with a big diversity of institutions, and as those other communities that we end
up talking to have languages that we understand and we can speak in, that's when we can start
to be useful.
So, when triple IF emerges out of Stanford and Oxford, and there are other colleagues
working on this, this is a standard for interoperability of images that makes so much sense, and, so,
for us to get in that conversation, we have to be able to speak, we have to be able to
listen, and so it's a translation activity too.
>>Dan Cohen: Yeah, I mean I’ll add I thought Sibyl's point about the arrows is really key.
I mean that is the borders there and how you get things from what really should be a very
diverse set of institutions and operations and all those things.
Also, at the same time, being able to co mingle and, you know, allow for innovation between
those institutions, I think is really key.
So, DPLA tries to handle some of those little arrows that are really important.
There's a lot of behind the scenes work we do.
For instance, on the normalization of the data where we understand we've got 1600 institutions
in this range from very small historical societies up to the Smithsonian, and so we need to combine
all those things, so we act as that little arrow I think between, allowing for diversity
while also acting as the translator and then allowing for something to happen at scale,
which you can’t do if you’re just simply tiny little islands spread around.
>>Evelyn McLellan: I think, we've talked a little bit about local idiosyncrasies versus
what general needs are, and I think we have to be careful when we look at local idiosyncrasies
to figure out how idiosyncratic they really are, because I think what one institution
might consider a unique problem is actually a problem that a lot of other institutions
have and I think it's important for institutions to get together and talk about what it is
they're trying to do.
For example, we worked with a couple of institutions that needed to preserve forensic discs, and
it turned out that their needs were actually very similar.
So, I would ask an institution that says we are a special snowflake, we have these very
specific needs, are you really that different, and if you're that different, maybe that's
a little bit of a problem and you should take a look at what it is you're trying to do and
how you’re trying to do it.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: Great.
So, these hub institutions can also be facilitators between the more local, more idiosyncratic
institutions.
Great.
I think we have a question over here.
>>Michael Mayhem: My name is Michael Mayhem.
I'm with the New York Public Library.
This is a question that I think would have been good for the last panel.
I think it’s good for you too.
I think it’s going to come up all day, and it's really, I'm thrilled to see us as a group
embracing this idea of the network to solution and the idea of building on 20 years of experimentation,
recognizing that we're not starting from zero, and I think what emerges from this is a vision
for this sort of patchwork quilt of solutions, where different kinds of institution build
a part of the solution and we switch it together.
So, New York Public Library institutions are 100 years old or a little more and is intensely
local even though we are a large institution, and so, I guess my question is, as some of
you are, you know, representing DPLA, being to me the stand out that I am most familiar
with, but all of you, institutions that are trying to build this national platform, my
question is do we have the right institutions already?
Do we need new ones, or do the ones that exist need to evolve?
Because I think there is always going to be some tension with, certainly the public library
is a great example, funded by local taxpayers with an intentionally local mission, and there's
always this struggle and trade off between serving our core local mission and building
something that's going to be useful at the core, so moving your project from the fringe
use case you were excited about to something that's national in scale, and, so, I guess
as we continually wrestle with that, I think we can make tremendous progress by taking
experiments that have been done at that fringe and scaling them up, but I also wonder if
we have the right kinds of institutions, so, you know, looking at DPLA being brand new
and an institution that was designed to fit in the world of the web and in this time and
in this way.
So, my question is do we expand some of these institutions to be broader?
Or is this not really problem?
Is it possible for that patchwork quilt to really grow into something that is holistic
and seamless?
>>Dan Cohen: Sure, so you know, I think it's very important, when thinking about participation
and the kinds of organizations that should be involved, that we rely not purely on good
will but on narcissism.
I think narcissism is a very important motivator, and, so, I always try to think in terms of
the social psychology of this of why institutions would want to participate with something like
DPLA, or when are there new organizations or technologies or platforms that might be
needed to enable those local institutions, say, hey, we really need that, right?
So, I think that, thinking through that social psychology is very important, and I think
for DPLA, we are trying, in effect, to provide a lot of value and a lot of services to a
variety of institutions, where they can, again, still maintain autonomy, all of those things,
we're not sucking them dry and taking their stuff and leaving, you know, their local institutions
to not have any role.
Clearly, they have very important roles, the center of their communities in the case of
public libraries, but we do allow them then to connect into this massive infrastructure,
right, and I think the other panelists as well, they are enabling new functionality
that really does add value.
But these institutions can choose to be a part of.
New York Public Library I think is part of our collaboration with public libraries and
it's really wonderful in that it's bi directional, right?
You have a digital collection that we're also providing discovery for, and recently, when
you redesigned your digital connection space, there's a wonderful link right on the digital
collection space to say hey, find this at DPLA, you can find more things like these
items, which enables New York Public, which is this wonderful institution and has many
audiences in New York and around the world, but it allows you to connect into 1599 other
institutions and their holdings and what they have, so that gives you tremendous value to,
in a sense, have us as a broker for what you're doing and to leverage that.
So, I think continually thinking about that kind of, you know, why should we participate,
what are the incentives here, and again, the narcissism part rather than, I love good will,
it's great, but we want people to find the value in that, and DPLA is certainly working
really hard to articulate that value.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: If I could, I really liked the metaphor of the patchwork quilt, and you
said that there are these pieces that we need to stitch together, and it occurs to me that
the stitching is provided by sort of the people on the ground in the institutions, and, you
know, Sibyl mentioned that when you choose these kind of open platforms over spending
a lot of money on a proprietary platform, what you're really doing is not really choosing
a cost savings, you're choosing to invest your money in your people, to get them trained
and to get them involved in an open source community and learn how to use those technologies,
and I wonder, Sibyl, if you could say a little bit about the kinds of challenges that a smaller
institution that is involved in these larger digital initiatives faces in training staff
and getting staff.
We are going to have a panel on that later on today, but I wonder if you could say a
little bit about that.
>>Sibyl Schaefer: Yeah, well, it is quite tricky.
For awhile, we didn't even have enough money, well, we never really had enough money to
hire a full time developer, and, so, being in archive, I felt that the most core background
was really education in archival studies, to apply that archival theory and really steep
in archival was essential, and then to kind of pick up the tech skills as they went along,
and it really depended on the open source software and what documentation was available
and how responsive developers were and how they responded was actually quite critical,
because you can respond and give a helpful answer that helps a user actually learn how
to do something versus just kind of being dismissive or doing it for them, and I think
that the successful software programs really have that kind of teaching element to them,
so they work with the constituencies to say, okay, this is how you file a bug report, this
is how you develop a user story, and you kind of work with the actual groups, so you educate
them as they participate in the program.
>>Tom Sheinfeldt: Mark?
Okay, is that Amy?
I saw long blonde hair.
Sorry.
Hi, Amy.
>>Amy Garmer: Amy Garmer from the Aspen Institute.
I just wanted to respond to the last comment who raised this question of do we need institutions
to transform, do we need new types of institutions, and, you know, I think, certainly, at the
local level, we need the institutions to transform, and that part of that is understanding that
the job of the institution is no longer just to curate the world for the community, but
they are in fact curating the community for the rest of the world, and that's part of
the, you know, not just incentive, but that's part of the job that they need to be doing.
>>Tom Sheinfeldt: Excellent.
Other questions or comments?
If I could throw a comment, or a question over to Evelyn, sort of building on Sibyl's
remarks, so if we're thinking about the staff as being the thread that helps to stitch together
this patchwork quilt, I know in working on projects, open source software projects myself
on Omecca and Zotero, you know, one of the most dreaded questions I think that you can
get in the developer forums or in the help forums are I'm trying to make Omecca work
with this other thing, that, of course, your staff doesn't have any knowledge of or expertise
in.
What role can the providers for open source software tools for libraries, archives and
museums, do you have strategies for helping make those connections to others?
It's one thing to answer questions about your own product, but to answer questions about
how your product works with another, do you have strategies for dealing with that kind
of a problem?
Not to put you on the spot or anything.
>>Evelyn McLellan: It's hard, because in the discussion, we get so many questions about
why doesn't your software do this or will it work with this, and it's, I feel like our
software should do everything, and we often have to answer, we would love it if our software
could do that, but we would be looking for funding, which is not a very satisfactory
answer, but it's, we try to connect users with other software packages as often as we
can, but, often, the best thing is when the users jump in and answer the questions that
are asked by the first users, and we really like to see that, because we don't know all
the answers, we're just one small group of people, and if we can encourage the people
on our discussion list to talk to each other, we've seen some great back and forth conversations,
especially between large institutions that have a lot of resources and large scale implementations.
I love it when they jump in and answer a question from a small institution and say this is what
we did, and it worked for us, and you can look at this tool and you can do other things,
and I guess, I mean, this is kind of a diffuse answer, but I guess what I like to see is
knowledge flowing down from the larger institutions to the smaller institutions, because I really
think we need that, because there's some really fantastic things going on.
There’s a lot of great work that's being done in digital preservation and access, and
it's, I feel sometimes like the smaller institutions are just shut out.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: Other questions from the audience?
>>Dan Cohen: I have just a gloss on that.
One of the wonderful things that happened TPLA Fest last week is that there were in
fact directors of major university libraries in the same room with the heads of small public
libraries.
There were people from big museums and small historical societies in the same room, and,
you know, in my career, I've just, I've found those kinds of discussions, they're very,
very elusive, and, you know, there are conferences that bring together, you know, research libraries,
in fact, association research libraries is meeting as we talk, and that's great and those
folks need to get together, but it's very rare to have knowledge dissemination occur
across some of these boundaries, and I think IMLS and others in the room can play a real
role in sort of facilitating that type of conversation and I certainly hope TPLA Fest
can do that.
>>Karen Keviani: Hi.
Karen Keviani from WGBH.
I would like to speak to Evelyn's comment about how do you get smaller institutions
to be able to contribute to the larger, bigger institutions.
For example, I may have one or two developers that I could add to a sprint or some kind
of development work, but there needs to be better ways to engage them into that larger
community so that they are helping build something that will then help them locally, and I think
the Hydra’s working really hard to do that, which is great, but there's still a lot of
work that needs to happen in order to really fully engage those smaller institutions and
for the smaller institutions to really feel like they're contributing.
>> SPEAKER: Well this is, I mean, I ment to mention it during my talk but I'm so excited
about that Hydra and the Box Project, which is fantastic, because Hydra's a great tool,
and, so far, really the only institutions that have been able to use Hydra are the large
university libraries where they have core developers to develop Hydra gems and they’re
doing great things, but to see this possibility down the road of having, literally, an easy
to install Hydra instance, that has, you know, a lot of functionality for lots of institutions
to use I think it is very, very exciting, and it's great because it's a collaboration
between, you know, three major organizations, DPLA, Dura Space, and Stanford.
So, I think this is one of the most exciting projects I've seen in a while.
>> SPEAKER: And along with that, I'm on the technical advisory committee for Archive Space,
and that actual question came up with somebody who basically said I have developers, I want
to contribute to sprints, but I want to contribute to sprints where we're actually interested
in that development, and, so, I think the number one thing in open sourced software
they can put out there is a roadmap of what these sprints are going to be and what functionality
they're planning and that’s very helpful even for small organizations too.
They're waiting for some functionality to be developed to actually know when they can
expect it, because that influences decisions.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: I'll ask a question.
That’s something I was wondering about this morning.
You know, it occurs to me that a central element of the national digital platform, especially
for smaller institutions, but even for individual users at larger institutions, and something
that's not really represented here and maybe should be are consumer services, right, consumer
web services, like drop box or Google docs.
I mean, I know that, we like to, and, you know, I've done it myself in the marketing
for our open source tools, talk about things being easy to use or in a box, I've used both
of those phrases before, but what do we really mean by easy to use?
I mean, you know, like a good example, Omecca, it's easy to use compared to some other enterprise
systems, but it's not really easy to use like drop box is easy to use, and I think especially,
when we're talking about a range of institutions, where I think Dropbox really is pretty easy
to use for everybody, although not really for my mother.
I had to give my mother a Dropbox tutorial recently.
How do we maybe integrate with some of those really truly easy to use systems and bring
them into this conversation because I do think those are the tools that a lot of very, very
small institutions if they are using digital tools and digital work flows.
They’re making heavy use of some of these commercial services as we all do.
>>Dan Cohen: Well, I mean, I'll jump in and say here's where things like API's help out
a lot.
So, I'm not going to give your mom an API tutorial, but I will give a tutorial to a
third party developer that can integrate, for instance, DPLA and DPLA collections to
services like Twitter, Facebook, etc., so I think there again, that notion of bridge,
I think Sibyl’s notion of the arrows are very important, and I think one of the values
that DPLA provides is even if you're a small collection, you now have an API through DPLA,
right?
Your collections can be accessible, knitted together arrows in multiple directions because
you have participated in this national network, and I think that's really a signature kind
of aspect to any sort of national digital platform.
>>Cliff Lynch: Cliff Lynch from CNI.
I may be just trying to get at the question you just asked from a somewhat different perspective,
but I'd be interested in some comments on this.
We've heard quite a bit of discussion already about the barriers to participation for smaller
institutions that have very limited IT resources.
We've also heard quite a lot of discussion about open source software and things of that
nature.
I actually wonder if the national platform of this portfolio of resources particularly
is viewed by smaller institutions is not going to be, is going to be much more about services,
that really the idea is going to be there are services available out on the network
that hopefully work together in some kind of cohesive way, whereby, really, a lot of
the smaller institutions can avoid a good deal of the IT detail by just using these
services, and, so, I guess I'd invite some reflection about the balance of software and
services.
Certainly when I look at what's going on in other areas of information technology, especially
with, you know, smaller organizations, we see a massive shift of IT from locally mounted
services.
I'm sorry, locally mounted systems out into a services world.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: James?
>>James Shulman: So, with our IMLS funded project, that's very much our goal.
So, our goal is to take this platform, this core platform that we built, Shared Shelf,
and to make it available as free and open services for small institutions to use it,
to contribute to a national flow, and I think, over the years, with various funders, I think
it's been a lot of progress for people to realize, so we'll make the code for those
components open source, but we're not working to build an open source software there, we're
working to build components of a free service, and that free service will go to the small
museum, and that's why we're working with, you know, we have some large museums in the
group that got the grant with us and with DPLA, but we also have the Staten Island Museum,
and we have the El Paso Museum of Art, and we're not looking for some group that's going
to have three people to integrate, and interoperate, and make it work with their digital asset
management, their collections management and, you know, spit out a solar Rendex and if need
be, just write a little script to do this.
We really think that what we need to do is provide an on ramp that's easy, and I think
when we talk about a national digital platform, or a national platform, I mean, we all think
often of the federal highway system which has rules, you know, here’s how you get
on.
You don’t have a stop sign at the end of your ramp, and so, I very much think that
that's going to be a key part of getting people in the game.
>>Evelyn McLellan: I talked briefly about the enormous growth in the number of open
source software tools over the last five years or so.
I'm hoping over the next five years, we'll be talking about the enormous growth in hosting
services and hubs and networks things like DPen and, you know, expansion of services
provided by DPLA, because it literally, for some institutions they are not looking at
open source tools, they're not thinking about tools, they're thinking about their needs
and what services they can get, and from my perspective, I'm happy to develop open source
tools, and I hope that they get integrated into platforms and services that these institutions
can use, because they're not going to download and use Archive Matica in their own institution.
>>Dan Cohen: One of the reasons we're so grateful to have gotten IMLS funding along with Stanford
and Dura Space on you know, the hubs in a box idea, is in fact that idea that it can
be hosted remotely for institutions that don’t want to devote developer time, etc., or can’t
develop themselves.
Obviously, we’re creating open source software and we’ve got great partners.
I think it'll be terrific to have this out there and to be able to be deployable in that
way, but I also think it presents the opportunities for service based operation as well.
>>Jim Neal: Jim Neal, Columbia.
The costs of the IMLS sponsored event, we have focused, in this conversation, about
the state of a distributed national capacity.
I wonder if the panelists would talk a little bit about the state of an expanded global
capacity.
How do we fit into a larger platform which is global and far more diverse than US centric
issues that we’re talking about today.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: James, do you want to start?
>>James Shulman: Well, I think that these border conversations need common languages
and need translators, as I was saying before.
I think Dan can speak to the work that he does regularly and DPLA does with other national
libraries, and I think that's sort of the level of supra aggregation, and then there's
the micro level of letting people in the game, and I think those rules of invitation and
correspondence are very much the same around the world.
I mean, the intellectual property rules are different, and the languages are different,
so those are things, those are added modules that we have to figure out and that will slow
down some flows, but as you say, there's certainly no reason that those handshakes aren't extended
at the micro institutional level.
>> SPEAKER: So, Jim, it's happening right now.
I mean, it is happening.
Right now it’s the 100th anniversary of the Great War, the First World War.
DPLA’s data which is completely interoperable with Europeana and Digital Enze in New Zealand,
and Trove in Australia is all combined right now in large exhibition of hundreds of thousands
of items that Europeana mounted and were able to mount that because of the seamless interoperability.
So, you know, these are just the first steps, but I think that project alone, it’s called
Europeana 1914-1918 incredibly suggestive, and I think it would be a great role for IMLS
and others in the room to facilitate more of these conversations that I have regularly
with folks around the world, my counterparts other national and international digital library
projects.
I think there’s tremendous potential to, in a sense, bootstrap into a global digital
library through these methods.
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: Mark?
Oh, I’m sorry, mic in front.
>>SPEAKER: Tom, you mentioned linked open data in the first few sentences.
Could you speak a little bit more about it?
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: Me?
>> SPEAKER: Could anyone?
>>Tom Scheinfeldt: Why don't I open up to the panelists.
Anyone want to tackle linked open data?
>>Dan Cohen: I might pass the mic to Mark Matienzo but I will say it is an area of extreme
interest for DPLA.
I think, again, here's another role that we can play, is that a lot of institutions cancel
out linked data into their data payloads, and so, one of the things we can do as part
of the normalization and enhancement of the 1600 institutions’ data is in fact to add
in linked data as part of that process.
Their data is now super enhanced.
It's connected in new ways across institutions nationally, and indeed internationally through
linked data ideas, so it's an area where we're going to work really hard at DPLA to get going,
and in fact, if you look at our latest metadata application profile, 4.0, which you all should
read immediately, there is in fact a significant portion in that that's devoted to linked data,
so it's definitely on our radar.
>>Mark Matienzo: I'm Mark Matienzo the director of technology at DPLA.
I kind of wanted to follow up on something that was just said before about sort of Jim's
question about how things happen in the international context.
I mean, I think with representation of the panel and those of us in the room, I mean,
I don't want to just toot DPLA's horn or the horn of the Hydra project, but we have made
a lot of progress in starting to connect with Europeana on multiple levels, so the DPLA
metadata application profile is built on the Europeana data model, so we are a participant
in discussions in data modeling.
We now have succeeded in getting Europeana to contribute to data modeling efforts within
the Hydra community quite significantly, which is a very, very recent development, and they
are showing continued interest in sort of related and allied projects such as Blacklight
and Spotlight.
So, also, similarly, Archive Matica, you know, has an international community of users, and
so, you know, it sort of, when we think about the international community I think we need
to figure out what our plans are.
I mean, from my perspective, it's specifically around interoperability and sort of not repeating
effort around data modeling where it's not necessary.
You know, going back to what Evelyn said before, is I think this notion of idiosyncrasy is
kind of somewhat problematic, but they're not really idiosyncrasies.
If we start to see this problem at multiple places, this is a problem that exists in scale.
The types of things that Sibyl were talking about is really an international problem for
a lot of archives that are working with digital material.
So, you know, just because we start to feel the friction in our own institutions about
where these work flows fail, that, you know, that indicates a larger scale problem that
often exists on an international level.
>>Vicky Rice: So, Vicky Rice.
Stanford.
Another aspect of collaboration is the web archiving community, and IBC is at Stanford,
while Tom and I are here and not at that meeting and that is truly international.
You have the national libraries doing web archiving, you have the smaller libraries
doing web archiving through Archive It and other tools, and, so, I want to make sure
it doesn't get lost that, again, having API's, and Dan mentioned this, and I would love Dan
to come give a tutorial to my mother, please, having APIs so that the tools that are being
used to capture and preserve and disseminate and to manage the web published content would
be very, very important, and to make those tools easy to use so that the people that
Sibyl is talking about, the folks at the local level, can get their government documents,
the town government documents and preserve them and make them available would be just
huge.
>>Speaker: I think that's a great place for us to call it.
We thank you so much for talking about where we are now, this state of distributed national
digital capacity.
We will come back in 20 minutes or so and talk about the gaps, which is always more
fun, to talk about what we need still, and that's where we're, obviously, very interested.
So, thank you all.
Let's give them a round of applause for their help.
(Applause.)