Digital Collections Team
Minutes
June 17, 2009

Present: Susan Graham (chair), Lynda Aldana, Tom Beck, Michelle Flinchbaugh, Janet Hack, Lindsey Loeper, Vicki Sipe

Welcome and Review

• Susan moved the CONTENTdm files back to the I drive.

• Susan confirmed that DoIT will not support the use of Omeka for online exhibits so it is not an option.

• Terry Owens will be here on July 1 to discuss digital repositories.  He is the coordinator for the DRUM project.  The invitation is open to the entire group.  Michelle will make sure Robin knows about the meeting.

• Cont. discussion on what institutions are calling their digital collections:  It was very useful to look at the list of links team members submitted.  Most people liked what UVA has done to provide links to other resources.  We might want to consider doing something similar here at UMBC.

Develop Mission of the Group

• Review charge
  Susan had resent a copy of May Chang's email explaining why LEC came up with the charge.  After some discussion, the group agreed the charge was fine but decided to use the text from the explanatory paragraph in the email as the basis for a mission statement.  Susan will rework the text and post the charge and mission on the wiki for people to review.

• Discuss the name "Digital Collections"
  The group agreed that "Digital Collections" will work as the title for the CONTENTdm interface.

Develop Goals of Group

• Guidelines, documentation, priorities

1. Vicki, Tom, and Lindsey will review the best practices document and submit changes and/or additions

2. Lindsey will create the scanning instructions for text documents; instructions for scanning images are already available.

3. Vicki will post the documents used for the CONTENTdm  training, including the data dictionary

4. Susan, Tom, and Janet will review the rights document and update links on the web pages so that all instances point to the same document.  Lindsey requested that a section on UMBC created material be added.

• Projects to focus on

1. Special Collections will review photo scanning priorities

2. Discussion of how to request proposals for projects from people outside of the group.  One solution would be to add a place on the feedback form for people to submit ideas for projects.  Janet said she could do this.

• Promotion & outreach
  The group discussed what resources we have in order to do promotion and outreach.  Possibilities include but are not limited to, adding a "donate" button, adding to the online feedback form, articles in Insights, the Retriever, and myUMBC spotlight.  It is unclear how a "donate" button might work.  A "miscellaneous collections" link can be added for those items that were scanned as the result of patron requests, ad-hoc scanning, etc.

•  Training/Equipment/Staff needs to fulfill goals

1. Vicki will investigate whether there is administrator level training for CONTENTdm available that someone from LITS could attend.  There was some discussion about the user group meetings.  The group decided to wait on asking for a USMAI CONTENTdm group to be formed until there could be more discussions to gauge interest.  Towson and UB in particular might be interested.

2. Tom can purchase an additional scanner and the group discussed options for providing additional students to help with the scanning by either hiring additional students or sharing students from other departments.

3. For the formal launch of CONTENTdm there needs to be some coordination with reference.  Several options exist for providing training, including train-the-trainer type sessions or working with training on campus.  Lindsey has had a positive experience doing this for the records management course she has taught.

What to work on next

1. EAD finding aids - maybe not until next summer

2. Digital Repository - the meeting with Terry Owens is set and the next step might be to talk with faculty.  

3. Susan has a digital exhibit ready and Janet will help put it up.  It is on science fiction pulps and fanzines.

4. New Media is part of DoIT.  The library has talked about our services.  Maybe there could be a link or possibilities for partnering in the future.  

5. Usability testing - Janet has done some and we should continue discussing the options and plan to do some for the digital collections.

The next meeting is scheduled is July 1, 2009 with Terry Owens.  The recorder for that meeting will be Michelle Flinchbaugh.