Digital Library Steering Committee Progress Report--March 2006

The Digital Library Steering Committee met weekly to develop plans for dealing with legacy projects as well as developing a direction for new initiatives. The DLSC focused several discussions around the needs for content management and the possibility of creating one or more portal-like environments (e.g., an undergraduate, graduate, or professional portal or “information hub”). We have also stressed the need to develop the ability to push discrete library services into other web environments (e.g., OAK and departmental or school portals). We have identified the need to develop better assessment and analytics, focusing on how users (both local and remote) access and use our web based services.

The DLSC released three project teams: the SFX maintenance project, the Heard Library Web Site update project, the Heard Library Test Bed project. The Test Bed project is meant to provide a venue for market research, development of new services, and testing and refinement of services prior to production release. It will also be available for all committees to use for assessment purposes. The charges for each of these projects are posted to the committee’s wiki site.

We have also tested two web analytics packages (Saw Mill and NetTracker). We have joined VU ITS and PR, to take advantage of their new NetTracker service. However, we have limited use of this service. We can only upload logs from our public web server. We are pursuing the question of whether we should purchase our own version of this software so we can analyze the logs of all our web based services in context.

Among the highest priorities for this past six months (or longer) has been to develop strategies to integrate library services more seamlessly into the university’s course management system. This will continue to be a high priority for the next six months. The thought is that, in addition to attracting users to our web site(s), we need to be able to “take our services to wherever the users are.” Increasingly, a substantial percentage of our users are working in OAK. Along with the Center for Academic Life initiative, we have successfully lobbied to take on a greater role in the management and development of OAK, becoming one of the few libraries taking this role. Closer collaboration in this area will have significant implications for the development of new digital services.

In addition to our work with OAK in the coming months, we will work with other committees and groups to articulate an overall blueprint for developing, managing and presenting digital services and collections. This will involve discussions about content management, digital asset management, e-resource management, e-publishing, and digital services delivery.