LC21 A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress (2000) / Chapter Skim
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3. Building Digital Collections
3. Building Digital Collections
Pages 82-104
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From page 82... ...
Books and serials constitute only a minority of Me 119-million-item collection. The Library holds the worlcl's largest collections of motion picture films and newspapers and enormous quantities of manuscripts, prints, photographs, sound recordings, and maps.
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From page 83... ...
, including the following: · Selecting published works for the permanent collection from materials that authors and publishers submit on their own initiative to satisfy the mandatory deposit requirement of the copyright law. Receipts from the Copyright Office constitute the core of the collection, particularly those in four divisions: Geography and Map; Music; Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound; and Prints and Photographs.4 Selectors examine the cartloads of materials in the Copyright Office to identify Rose items that will be retained for Me permanent collections; approximately one-half of the published materials (and virtually none of the 2See |
From page 84... ...
The library has an acquisitions budget of approximately $10 million per year, much of which goes for purchases abroad;7 5The Copyright Office retains unpublished work that it receives off-site for 70 years after the death of the author, but such materials are not cataloged or integrated into the Library's collections. 6For additional information about the CIP program, see ~htip://lcweb3.10c.gov/cip/>.
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From page 85... ...
THE CHALLENGES OF DIGITAL COLLECTIONS The rapid growth of digital materials will challenge the Library in what it tries to collect, how it carries out its collecting role, and when and how it permits users to access its collections. Although there are many direct analogies between digital and physical collections, there are also significant differences.
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From page 86... ...
86 LC 21: A DIGITAL STRATEGY FOR THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ~~,~.,~:.~...~. Dices Got i.-.::-..
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From page 87... ...
Ejournals and e-books, which today bear a fair resemblance to their paper predecessors, are being distributed primarily through Internet-based subscriptions in which the publisher or distributor permits access to a remote site rather than providing a copy of a journal or book. A collecting model that relies on vendors providing copies of resources for processing and storage at the Library will not suffice for digital materials, especially when the item in question is dynamic and changes frequently.
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From page 88... ...
Licensing agreements can define the community of users who at any given time have access to a resource; for example, they may allow access only to members of a welldefined community, such as the students, faculty, and staff of a particular 10Collections of national importance, such as presidential papers, could then transcend current distinctions of "ownership," which now force users to visit multiple institutions (e.g., the Library, the National Archives and Records Administration (which manages the National Archives and the presidential libraries) , and the Smithsonian Institution)
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From page 89... ...
Today's fundamental changes require a reexamination of what a library needs physically to collect, what it can rely on others to hold while providing users with remote access, and under what conditions it can provide access to which users. There are experiments abroad with "national site license" models that seek to ensure the broadest possible access, but neither libraries nor publishers have pursued such models with any success in the United States.l2 Because of the dynamic, rapidly changing nature of many digital resources, the Library also needs to be more energetic in its approach to collecting digital information.
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From page 90... ...
With digital resources, the issue of access can be separated from that of stewardship. Therefore, an important question facing LC and all other libraries is how to define their digital collections.
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From page 91... ...
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From page 92... ...
Recommendation: For digital resources for which the Library does not assume long-term curatorial responsibility, the Library should work with other institutions to define appropriate levels of responsibility for preservation and access. Some materials that the Library acquires and makes available to its users may have only temporary value; other materials may be hosted on a Library site for more efficient access, with long-term archiving responsibilities accepted by another party.
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From page 93... ...
and unique mechanisms to help it meet these responsibilities, especially copyright deposit. Copyright Deposit The Library's role in registering copyright and enforcing the mandatory deposit law (discussed at length in Chapter 2~6 creates a unique opportunity for it to collect digital information that might otherwise vanish from the historical record.
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From page 94... ...
The current intent of CORDS is to permit certain applicants to prepare copyright registration applications, deposit digital materials, and handle transactions with the Copyright Office via the Internet. Approximately $900,000 is spent on CORDS per year: about $600,000 is provided to CNRI (through a DARPA contracting mechanism, to which DARPA itself has contributed a total of more than $1 million for development costs)
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From page 95... ...
Electronic copyright deposit is a strategic tool the Library will require in the digital world. It cannot risk being technically unprepared to deal with electronic copyright deposits and the smooth addition of such materials into its permanent collections.
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From page 96... ...
To achieve this goal, the resources and attention of Librarywide senior management should be directed to the Copyright Office, perhaps on a scale and with visibility comparable to those of the Integrated Library System implementation. The committee urges the Congress to support and fund the acquisition of a production system for receiving and managing digital objects.
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From page 97... ...
Accordingly, the Library must have an ongoing capacity to monitor these issues closely and systematically and have sophisticated staff involved in the deliberations. Licensed Resources 97 The Library's mandate for copyright registration and deposit provides a unique opportunity to capture and preserve digital information.
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From page 98... ...
If it concludes that a work makes an important contribution to the national collection, the Library may need to enforce aggressively the copyright law that requires publishers to deposit copies of works published in the United States. Capturing important digital content that is controlled by licensing agreements will require LC to take aggressive measures, including negotiating special licenses wish publishers.
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From page 99... ...
, the Swedish Web archiving project is creating a digital collection of all publicly accessible Swedish Web sites. The Swedish Royal Library considers publicly accessible Web sites "publications" that are subject to mandatory deposit.23 A similar effort is under way in Finland, and the Canadian National Library and the Australian National Library have programs for selectively collecting and preserving national content distributed via the Web.24 The challenge of capturing significant American content on the Web is much more daunting than any of the efforts mentioned here,25 23The Swedish Web archiving project is described at |
From page 100... ...
The committee applauds this effort. Not only will it bring important documentation of American life and culture into the Library's collections but it will also allow Library staff to become familiar with techniques for pulling materials from the Web and will expose the Library to a variety of policy and technical issues associated with proactively
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From page 101... ...
The elements of this infrastructure include reorienting existing methods of acquisition, such as copyright deposit, to the acquisition of digital materials. The Library requires a generalized infrastructure to support a much wider set of heterogeneous digital resources from a wide variety of sources.
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From page 102... ...
102 LC 21: A DIGITAL STRATEGY FOR THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS If., yes-. .e gone Tech .~ ....~..~.
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From page 103... ...
The Library will need expert staff to manage negotiations with publishers and other rights holders and to administer complex licensing agreements. Neither this committee nor any group of consultants can recommend details of the technical infrastructure that the Library needs until the Library refines its collecting aims and stewardship responsibilities for digital collections.
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From page 104... ...
704 [C 21; ~ ~~[ SPICY FOR ~ [~Y ~ CARESS Recom~endaHon: Throughout the Libras and pad1culady in Libras Services, the acquisH1on and management of digital collections -111 require that the professional Ubradans have high levels of technological Rareness and abash. The Libra needs to undertake lab redeslg~ traluln~ and reorganl~abon to achieve this gag.
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