Check out Digitization Diva at http://digitizationdiva.blogspot.com. According to blogger Christy Allen, a librarian at the North Carolina State Library, this blog "focuses primarily on the topics of digitization and Web 2.0 in a government library setting."

Recent posts have included a write up of a Best Practices Exchange 2007 session on Web 2.0 in State libraries that I wasn't able to attend and a listing of some interesting looking image collections and how they were promoting themselves via web 2.0 technologies.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've written about my experiences at the 2007 Best Practices Exchange in Chandler, Arizona. You can find all of my other postings at
http://freegovinfo.info/taxonomy/term/339.

I wanted to close my coverage with a note of praise for my fellow state documents librarians and archivists. While we could have simply have linked to agency resources and allowed them to control libraries' level of access, most people working in state libraries and archives recognize their responsibility to collect, describe, preserve and provide meaningful enduring access to their state's publications. Whether we try to disburse the publications as Alaska does using LOCKSS, or make their publications available for easy downloading like other states, we are libraries taking custody of electronic government publications. We make mistakes, but we try and in many cases are starting to build examples for others to follow.

So, if you're involved in federal government information, review our presentations at the Exchange and see if you might be able to start to take custody of the high-profile federal publications that might not stick around if left to the government's devices and short-sighted funding priorities.

As I mentioned in my previous posting on the 2007 Best Practices Exchange, we had two keynote speakers.

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was our second keynote and was an inspiration for those of us trying to be good custodians of electronic government information. Brewster told us that our generation had the opportunity to build "Universal Access to All Knowledge" that will be "Free to All." He then worked his way through different kinds of tangible media to demonstrate how they could be digitized cheaply and easily. He waived away copyright concerns, which I accepted since he was talking in terms of technology.

I found Brewster most convincing about digitizing audio and video. He estimated that it would take roughly 20-40 million dollars to digitize existing analog audio and noted that the Internet Archive already had 100,000 items in over 100 collections. Moving images could be scanned at the rate of $200/hr and video for $15/hr.

I found him the least convincing about digitizing text, even though he seemingly spent the most effort on it.

Briefly, he stated that the Library of Congress held 28 million books containing about 28TB of data. At the current cost of hard disk storage, just $60,000 would be enough to store all 28 million books. The Internet Archive has been able to make great strides in digitizing equipment and Brewster said that they can digitize 12,000 books a month at a cost of $30/book. He stated that at those costs, the entire LC collection could be scanned for approximately $800,000,000, a very reasonable figure.

However, he failed to mention that at a rate of 12,000 books a month, it would take a little over 194 years to digitize 28 million books. That figure might have been in the back of Brewster's mind because he stated that although $800 million would be enough to digitize all of the Library of Congress, digitizing one million books might be enough to significantly advance knowledge. This figure could be accomplished in as little as seven years and aside from social/political concerns is very doable.

About those concerns, Brewster faced them head on after taking us through the technology. He quoted someone as saying that "technology is easy, people are hard!" He talked about the Internet Archives work in fighting the seemingly
unlimited extensions of copyright and their efforts bringing orphan works into the public domain. He framed the issue as one of whether the future should be public or private; open or proprietary. Perhaps the right phrase, Brewster suggested is "public or perish." He certainly won't get an argument from us folks at Free Government Information on that.

A few other items from his talk:

• The $100 laptop is real. Well, it's $175, but it is real and has a very clear readout. Brewster passed around a laptop with a children's e-book on it. You paged through it with buttons.
• The Internet Archive has developed a bookbinding machine that can print books fro $0.01/page or a 300 page book for $3.00. We saw slides of the machine in action in the developing world. We saw a finished product and it seemed like a decent binding.
• A library at the University of Illinois is scanning items from their microfilm collection at the rate of 10-30 reels a day. Internet Archive provided the scanning equipment free and the library provides staffing.

You should have been there. If you get the chance to listen to Brewster, take
it! The next best thing is looking at his presentation
slides. Or watch him speak at the Library of Congress in 2002.

We had a double keynote at Best Practices Exchange 2007: Former legislator and current Arizona Corporation Commissioner Jeff Hatch-Miller and Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle.

Both gave such good presentations that they deserve separate blog entries. This is Jeff's.

Jeff Hatch-Miller was an engaging speaker who was invited to help us figure out to build support for our various state initiatives. His experience as a legislator provided an insider's perspective. His talk centered on three themes:

1. Getting noticed - in a good way
2. Getting Legislative attention
3. Getting into the "recommended budget"

My notes aren't complete enough for a section-by-section recitation of Jeff's points, so here are some impressions:

Jeff started his talk by reading us mission statements from three organizations. He wanted us to pick out the one that best described "who they are and what they do." The only one that stuck with me was the one chosen by the audience "At Sheldon Clinic, we give people back the use of their hands." Jeff told us that we have to be that clear about who we are and what we do because there are MANY agencies and organizations doing quite good work competing for legislative time and attention.

Another statement that really resonated with me and the rest of the group was Jeff's statement (paraphrased) - "It's not about you. People give to you because you MEET needs, not because you have them." He also said it was more important to communicate the "why" rather than the "what". Funding is about relationships, which you need to build while being subtle.

A major tip for getting favorable attention is relating yourself to K-12 education. How can your collections relate to k-12? Are there stories about students and teachers using your resources and services that you can pass along to your funding authority?

Programs tend to be part of yearly recommended budgets if they have constitutional or statutory authority behind them. Some funding efforts can take years. It's important to visit legislators in their home districts for relationship building, which is hard to do in the pressure cooker of a legislative session.

Finally, never ever burn bridges. Your enemy today maybe the ally you need tomorrow.

If you are organizaing a conference that needs a speaker to talk about raising money from legislative bodies, I highly recommend Commissioner Jeff Hatch-Miller. He can be reached through his web page at http://www.azcc.gov/commissioners/hatch-miller/index.htm.

At Best Practices Exchange 2007, I listened to Todd Welch talk about the Colorado Plateau Digital Archives at http://www.nau.edu/library/speccoll in the context of his work with OAI (Open Archives Initiative) compliant data.

I've heard about OAI, read articles about OAI and even had fellow FGI volunteers explain OAI to me but for some reason it didn't take. It kept being some technical standard that I probably know something about but made my eyes glaze over when it was mentioned.

But Todd's talk changed that. I still don't know OAI well enough to try to explain here and my notes from his session are somewhat thin. But I now have a good grasp of WHY it's important.

Designing databases and other applications to by OAI compliant allows other people to harvest data about about your project and reuse it in other applications. For example, OAIster gathers descriptive data (metadata) about collections around the world and makes them searchable in one place.

There are benefits to narrower applications than OAIster. For example, Todd said that if other states in his area ran OAI compliant databases that could both generate and import data in OAI format, all of the states could build stronger collections about the Colorado Plateau because all the bordering states would have each others records to search.

So now I get that part and hope I've communicated a little of the magic to you. It's enough that I'm now at least somewhat interested in finding a way to issue my state's depository shipping lists in an OAI compliant format, but I'm not sure where to begin. My list is generated by our SIRSI Unicorn system and then reformatted in Word for the print version and finally marked up in HTML for web access and LOCKSS harvesting. I'd need a solution that added very little work to what I'm already doing. Any ideas out there?

At the recently closed Best Practices Exchange 2007, Kelly Eubank of the North Carolina State Archives presented how NC has made archived agency web pages available throught their use of the Archive-It tool.

The NC collection can be found at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/archives/webarchives/index.html.

Looking at all the collections available from the Archive-IT web sites, it seems like a number of state governments are using this tool:

• Alabama - several collections
• Arizona - several collections
• Indiana State and Local Documents by Indiana University
• Virginia - several collections by Library of Virginia
• Michigan
• Montana
• Nebraska - County gov't sites saved by Nebraska Historical Society.
• North Carolina - several collections
• North Dakota - several collections
• Tennesee - several collections
• Utah - several collections

Let's hear it for all of the these state libraries, archives and universities trying to gather the information output of their state agencies.

FGI would warmly welcome any detailed statements from owners of the collections above, particularly about their future access plans.

There were so many good presentations at Best Practices Exchange 2007, that is doesn't seem fair to single out any one of them as "really cool", but I can't think of another phrase for Robert Hulshof-Schmidt's Creating an Online Documents Repository on a Shoestring presentation.

Robert is on the staff of the Oregon State Library and he described how his library used a new depository law, the mixed blessing of a statewide Content Management System and some nifty programming to create a system that automatically harvests agency publications, deposits them to a library web server and creates a URL for document catalogers. It's not entirely automated. Nothing can be in the current state of affairs, but it sounds like it minimizes the need for human review of a lot of files.

Another nice feature of the Oregon system is that it automatically converts ingested documents into either HTML (if text based) or PDF (if binary based, like Word/Excel). So it looks like OSL is able to do some important potential preservation work at the point of ingestion.

Oregon's document repository can be found at http://egov.oregon.gov/OSL/GRES/REPOS/.

At Best Practices Exchange 2007, there was much talk about appropriate file formats for preservation. I brought this up during my presentation on LOCKSS and there was general agreement about how we need open, non-proprietary formats to have any real chance of doing long-term digital preservation. Some states, including Oregon are converting documents they receive into more open formats like HTML and PDF. Oregon even has an automated tool for doing so, but more about that in another posting.

Glen McAninch of the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives gave a presentation specifically on this topic, called Format Issues in Digital Preservation. His slides will hopefully show up on the schedule page in the next few weeks.

Glen described Florida's work in providing "risk assessment" information to state agencies about different kinds of file formats. They take several factors into account - open vs. closed, current market share, existence of current conversion tools, etc. After describing Florida's work, Glen suggested that Kentucky might go down a similar path. It looked useful, but I couldn't find a link to the Florida document to share with you. There are some snippets from the Florida document in Glen's presentation, which will hopefully be posted soon.

While not mentioned at the Exchange, two good sources for information about file formats and their link to digital preservation are the PRONOM Registry of file format documentation and the File Formats Blog.

As I mentioned in my introduction to the Best Practices Exchange 2007, one of the tracks was Metadata & Discovery. Under this heading were a number of sessions aimed an answering the question, "How can we find out about new state publications if the agency won't tell us when they put out new stuff?" This is a question that still plagues me in Alaska, even though I have a spidering program that generates a list of new files added to agency web servers. The basic problem is that what I get is a list of files, which me and an assistant need to comb through to see if there are any documents to be claimed, printed, etc. This is time intensive, taking between 10 and 20 hours for a state with a gov't as small as Alaska's. The holy grail for us would be any way to be notified just about documents.

One of the sessions I attended offered two options that I think will really help my program. I intend to start implementing these options this week. If they work well and I remember, I'll report back in six months or so.

The session was done by Michelle Reilly of the Arizona State Library and Mary Jo Lazun of the Maryland State Law Library.

Michelle's presentation was on using the calendar in Microsoft Outlook as a way of reminding program staff to check for new agency serials and annual reports. While we have a paper "print from web" listing that my assistant checks every Friday, what I like about Michelle's use of Outlook Calendar is the ability to check off issues captured and that we can key reminders to publication frequency. So instead of visiting EVERY serials page every Friday just in case, we can put frequency appropriate reminders so only a small set of pubs needs to be visited on any given day. Michelle's instructions and screen shots should be available on the presentations page in the next few weeks.

Mary Jo is interested in capturing new titles the library doesn't know about yet. Her presentation was concerned with using page alerting software to track agency pages. I tried and discarded this option about three years ago but alerting services appeared to have improved since then. Mary Jo is currently using WatchThatPage, which seems to be working for her, but encourages people to try other options. Mary Jo sets her page watchers on agency home pages and any obvious "publications pages." She currently has about 500 page watchers organized by agency. She estimates about 2/3 of the page updates are trivial changes (date changes, etc), but that the rest hold some value for her library.

Because the conference held five simultaneous sessions most of the time, I didn't get to most of the metadata and discovery tracks. Hopefully we'll see more writeups from attendees.

From May 2-4, 2007, it was my privilege to attend and present at Best Practices Exchange 2007. The purpose of this conference was to share information on how states and other organizations are discovering, describing, preserving and providing access to digital, (mostly government) information. There were six broad tracks - Metadata & Discovery, Access, Preservation, Technology, Project Management & Outreach, and Emerging Issues. A more detailed explanation of the tracks is available on the web site.

This conference drew 103 registered attendees representing 32 States and Provinces from 61 organizations. A list of presenters and presentations is available at http://bpexchange.org/presentations_chron.htm
and should have all the presentation slides, including mine in the next few weeks. But in case you can't wait, I've attached my LOCKSS presentation slides to this blog post.

Those who know me well know that I find it hard to resist cliches. So I have to say this isn't your parents' conference. The organizers of this conference followed last year's model of very short presentations (10-20 minutes) with small audiences (20-35) to allow for maximum discussion and sharing between states and organizations. I didn't attend last year, but I found the format very helpful and invigorating. There were also long breaks and lunches to facilitate networking. During one "break", someone from InterPARES
took the time to do a one-to-one JHove tutorial for me. JHove extracts technical metadata from a large variety of files and I really wish I had a working knowledge of it when I prepared our latest "gubernatorial snapshot" DVD for the Alaska State Publications Program. I'm so impressed, I might offer a file analysis as an optional download.

This conference has something for everyone regardless of their experience with technology. There are a variety of sessions and all speakers were patience and supportive of all questions. As a result, I even think I now have a partial handle on OAIster and OAI-PMH, which I didn't despite having tried to read many articles on the subject.

Assuming this conference is offered next year, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you register. As soon as I hear that BPE 2008 is being planned, I'm going to start promoting it to the entire Alaska State/Federal depository community.

Over the next few days, I plan to write more about what I learned from the Exchange. It will be more about lessons learned than a blow-by-blow description of sessions. I might make an exception for the keynotes, which were done by Brewster Kahle and former Arizona legislator Jeff Hatch-Miller.

If you are reading this and were a fellow BPE2007 attendee, would you include a tag of BPE2007 in anything you blog about? Thanks!

At the Best Practices Exchange 2007, I learned that the Montana State Library is providing RSS feeds for their new state publications. See http://msl.mt.gov/PubRSS/RSSNewPubs.asp for details.

I (and I think my FGI colleagues) would really like to see GPO implement something like this for new titles in their current catalog and definitely in FDSys.

Meanwhile, Montana uses the same ILS system my library does, so next week I hope to get details from MT, pass them onto my systems administrator, and who knows? Perhaps AK will join the growing ranks of state depository RSS feeds!