Library of Congress

Laura Campbell (keynote) from the Library of Congress spoke about their strategy for change which started with the appointment of James Billington as the Librarian of Congress. The new focus was and is on increased accessibility. Out of this came American memory, Thomas, Learning page. These target the general public, Congress, and students. Each year they have 110 million online and 2 million onsite visits.

Their recent initiatives have focussed on partnerships and collaborations. The National digital newspaper program – in collaboration with National Endowment for Humanities has15 partners and almost 1 million pages online. The Flickr project (you can read a recent report on this). As a result of involvement in Flickr the viewing of photographic material in the Library of Congress website has increased by 20%. It will be interesting to see if the State Library has similar changes as a result of our involvement in the Flickr commons.

The National Digital Information Infrastructure and preservation program aims to capture “at risk “ born digital material”. This is done through a distributed network of over 130 partners who collect this content. It is in all formats of digital material including geospatial, news, e-journals…) This collaboration has collected 248 terabytes of at risk content (with partners) and by 2013 should have 650 terabytes

The strategy for effectiveness in a project like this is to
o take early action
o learn by doing
o be catalytic
o act collaboratively
o engage multiple platforms
o leverage natural, distributed networks
o share resources

See www.digitalpreservation.gov for more information.

Another venture to watch for is the World digital library network. This has over 25 partners and includes enhanced description and consistent high quality metadata. You will be able to search by place, time, topic, type of item, institution in 6 Unesco languages plus Portuguese. Viewers can add content. Core metadata has to be provided by the contributor in their first language. There are three pillars to the strategy for this project – content acquistion, construction of sustainable network, and development of state of the art web site. The public launch date is 21 April. Watch this site www.worlddigitalibrary.org. Laura finished her presentation by saying “creative collaboration is the key to future invention and innovation”.