Notes
Meeting March 9, 2001
In Attendance: Mary Margaret Bell, Susan Brown, Betsy Morelock, Miko Pattie, Margie Plarr, Daniel Rabuzzi, Glenn Smoot, Sue Lynn Stone, Jeff Suchanek, Glen Taul, Barbara Teague, Eric Weig, Mary Winter.
Marketing of digital resources
We rearranged the agenda to permit guest Daniel Rabuzzi to address the group
first about the marketing of digital resources. Daniel is with the CPE and
works on new economy and e-commerce issues. He discussed his idea that Kentucky
institutions might consider forming a consortium to lease digital images to
commercial, for profit users. He compared such a possible consortium to the
Corbis enterprise established by Bill Gates and Getty Imageworks, another enterprise
concerned with marketing of this type. Daniel suggested one possibility might
be establishing a supplier contract with Corbis and the like. If such a consortium
was established, it would only affect dealings with commercial users; institutions
would continue to provide images to scholars and non-profits as they do now.
KYVL would receive a portion of the fees as the clearinghouse, with the remainder
going to the institutions owning the originals. All money received by KYVL
would be returned to this project to increase the digitization of material at
the institutions.
The institutions would cede some control in return for a higher financial gain. The institutions must own the rights to the images included. The group decided to consider the idea to answer the question: is this in principle worth exploring? and revisit at the next meeting.
Finding aid status
Eric reported that more than 900 finding aids are now on the live server. He
said everything on the live server now has records in the database. He is working
on the KHS finding aids. KHS still has more than 1066 finding aids on the test
server. Eric doesn’t think Record Builder performs well over the web for archivists
to enter large quantities of records. He has had success transferring information
from Excel. It was decided that he will distribute an Excel template for creation
of records at the institution level. The group discussed whether or not we
were ready to take the database live and we decided to go ahead. Eric asked
for additional feedback concerning the topic list we created, as it would be
easier to add topics now.
The question of when to issue a press release was considered. Miko and Susan said they were looking for interesting items either to feature in a press release or to use in demonstrations and the like. Miko and Susan asked each repository to identify two items of particular interest (“wow!”) and send these to them for use in promotional materials. They would prefer something with links to individual items mounted on the server.
Disclaimers – Materials In Development
The question of adding a general statement to our help pages about selected
items in the collection not being “perfect” but in development was discussed,
based on suggestions from personnel at the University of Louisville. The group
felt that, like most material on the Web, the site would always be in construction
or development. We decided to follow the current model with the finding aids
and only put disclaimers on specific items rather than create such a general
statement.
Microfilm RFP Status
The next item addressed was the status of the RFP draft for the outsourcing
of microfilm for digitization. Eric expressed his concern about the time slipping
away if we were to either get the work done or even get a contract by the end
of this fiscal year. A backlog in the KYVL office has slowed this process.
In the meantime, Eric thought about the possibility of the digitization site
at UK purchasing the necessary machine to do the work ourselves. The cost of
the machine would be in the neighborhood of $60,000. Eric would also need to
purchase some software to assist in working with large scale images, Mr. Sid,
for approximately $7,000. Miko said she preferred the idea of purchasing the
machine, since we would continue to have the capability to do more of this type
of work, after the initial digitization. The group at large also thought it
preferable to spend the money for the machine rather than lose it if the RFP
process was stalled. KYVL will therefore pursue this alternative in lieu of
proceeding with the RFP.
Some discussion of future resources also took place. As the state anticipates budget cuts, no additional state funding beyond the minimum maintenance amounts planned for the next biennium is expected. The committee will soon need to explore grant funding for continued work. Eric suggested we follow the leads of other states in compiling a list of published source material in the public domain (copyright protection expired.) He is especially interested in copies that have been rebound. They could be unbound, scanned, and rebound.
Memorandum of Agreement
Consideration of the proposed memorandum of agreement was deferred as Milton
Skeen was unable to attend the meeting and a draft of the agreement was not
available.
Copyright Workshop
We discussed possible consultants to be brought in to do a one-day copyright
workshop for the committee and other staff from the repositories. It was decided
to try Peter Hirtle of Cornell first, since he is an archivist and addresses
archival concerns in this area. Other possibilities are Laura Gasaway of the
law library at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Kenneth Crews
of Indiana University-Bloomington.
Next steps
We will communicate by e-mail about the subject areas and copyright consultant.
We will wait to hear if Eric is able to contract with a consultant to come prior
to June 30, who that would be, and when the proposed date of the workshop would
be.
Respectfully submitted,
Mary Margaret Bell
This page was last updated on March 19, 2000.
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