Present: Elaine Day (Averett, Chair), Rae Best (GMU), Amy Boykin (CNU), Glenn Bunton (ODU), Mary Ann Chappell (JMU), Deanna Chavez (RMU), Susan Deaton (Longwood), Liz Linton (Sweet Briar), Katherine McKenzie (W&M), Leslie O'Brien (VT), Jamie Redwine (Hollins), Gary Stottlemyer (UVA).
Guest: Thornton Staples, Director, Digital Library Research and Development, University of Virginia.
Elaine distributed a model for our report and recommendations to the Steering Committee and invited members to revise it as needed.
The committee’s public documents are now linked from the VIVA web pages (About VIVA/Committees: (http://www.vivalib.org/tech/cat/link/)
Elaine noted that the VIVA ILL Forum highlighted a problem and possible issue for our group. Despite the fact that several VIVA vendors allow ILL for electronic journal articles, ILL staff are generally reluctant to lend electronic articles due to lack of permission data at the journal title level. Can e-serials management systems be encoded with information on ILL provisions?
As guest speaker, Thornton Staples gave an overview
of University of Virginia’s FEDORA Project. FEDORA (Flexible and Extensible
Digital Object and Repository Architecture) is a digital library infrastructure
originally developed at Cornell. In 1999 UVa created a digital library research
and development group to organize multiple collections of digital resources,
that included SGML encoded e-texts, digital still images, video and audio files,
and social science and geographic data. The group selected FEDORA as the management
system. The project is funded jointly by the library and a research grant from
the Mellon Foundation. For more information on FEDORA, see the following articles:
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july00/staples/07staples.html)
(http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/fedora.htm)
A discussion of needs assessment centered on the question of resources currently expended for managing electronic resources at each VIVA institution. A suggestion was made to reword the question in order to focus on the value of what VIVA might be able to provide in terms of saving resources. It was also requested that the questions be numbered. The survey is functionally ready, and can be publicized after the changes are made. Leslie agreed to analyze the survey results.
Mary Ann gave a demonstration of Endeavor’s LinkFinderPlus, which was recently installed at JMU. One requested enhancement is to make it possible to load data from a source such as SerialsSolutions instead of manually entering each title. This enhancement would make the product more attractive to a consortium such as VIVA. She also showed comparisons with ExLibris’s SFX product through Los Alamos National Laboratory. There was a brief discussion of ExLibris’s MetaLib with SFX, including implementations at MIT and Boston College.
Elaine suggested that individual members specialize in products and arrange vendor demonstrations for the committee. Mary Ann has already accumulated considerably information and experience with Endeavor’s LinkFinderPlus and ENCompass. Jamie is interested in the ExLibris products. Several members are familiar with or currently implementing SerialsSolutions. Mary Ann noted that someone should also review Fretwell Downing Informatics ZPORTAL.
Liz suggested visiting vendors at the Virginia Library Association meeting in Williamsburg.
Discussion followed on the feasibility of open source solutions for VIVA, with general agreement that we should maintain close ties with developers, especially of Virginia initiatives like FEDORA, while looking to commercial vendors to facilitate the technical processes required to make those initiatives work across the spectrum of VIVA libraries.
Gary will host our next meeting at the UVa Law Library in September.
Action items:
Leslie O'Brien
Virginia Tech