LC21 A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress (2000) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-22
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From page 1... ...
Will the great research libraries continue to be the point of entry to the information universe for their select bands of users? Will the integration of digital with print information succeed, or will print suffer a damaging loss of prestige in the general rush to exploit the possibilities of the Internet?
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From page 2... ...
The committee is firm in its belief that the Library continues to play a vital role in documenting and preserving the history of American creativity and in building a collection with truly worldwide scope. But the Library cannot go on as before.
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For example, the National Digital Library Program has been a dramatic example of what can be done when there is innovative management and a clear goal. What the Library now needs to do is learn from that project and broaden and deepen its strategic awareness of how that project can help lead to the next generation of substantially more ambitious involvement with digital information.
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But the committee is convinced that the heart of what it has learned and the heart of the Library's future are in the areas touched on above: (1) inventing a new form for acquiring and preserving materials that include digital information in all its forms, in particular information that is born digital; (2)
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From page 5... ...
To read only this summary would gravely risk preferring tactics to strategy and quick fixes to hard institutional work. Building Digital Collections Collections and Access While the Library of Congress and virtually all other libraries have well-developed policy statements to guide Weir acquisition of physical artifacts, analogous policy statements need to be fashioned for the digital content.
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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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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 7 Copyright deposit is not Me only means by which the Library can acquire digital materials for its collections.
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Recommendation: The Library should put in place mechanisms that systematically address the policies, procedures, and infrastructure required for it to collect diverse types of digital resources and to integrate them into its systems for description and cataloging, access, and preservation. Recommendation: Throughout the Library and particularly in Library Services, the acquisition and management of digital collections will require that the professional librarians have high levels of technological awareness and ability.
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in 2000 and 2001 with a pilot set of publishers and distributors of significant digital content, in order to conduct additional experimental programs for storing and maintaining digital information in off-site and on-site · — resposltor~es. Recommendation: For all fail-safe arrangements' the Library must regularly test the integrity of the materials and systems and its capacity to accept responsibility in a timely way.
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Preservation issues need to be addressed in a coordinated way that is, the copyright deposit of digital content, building of digital collections, design of Me digital repository, and development of digital preservation capabilities need to be considered holistically. Finding: The Library of Congress lacks an overarching strategy and long-range plan for digital preservation.
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From page 11... ...
The initiative by the Council on Library and Information Resources that builds on the OAIS should also be consulted. Organizing Intellectual Access to Digital Information: From Cataloging to Metadata 11 The Library of Congress has historically played and continues to play an essential role in coordinating the cataloging standards that have made cooperative cataloging possible.
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. Revolutionary changes in industries such as publishing, entertainment, and software and technological developments at universities and in government mean that outreach and engagement beyond Capitol Hill, at home and abroad, are more important than ever.
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Funding and Budgetary Issues 13 Many of the digital initiatives discussed in this report have additional direct costs, because they do not replace existing processes but instead add to the work of the Library. While the committee discussed possible sources for funding including increases in the Library's congressional appropriation, gifts from industry or foundations, cost savings derived
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It is unlikely and undesirable that such activity would become a major source of funding and the committee cannot emphasize too strongly that such revenues should never be taken as an excuse for limiting or reducing government funding for the core missions of the Library but room must be made for experimentation and partnership. Finding: Year-to-year operating funds and traditional capital funds will be inadequate sources of funding for new Library initiatives for the foreseeable future because the initiatives are not likely to result in significant cost savings and may well require increased funding—for instance, the National Digital Library Program adds costs and does not result in any savings, because the capabilities being developed are new and do not replace any existing processes.
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From page 15... ...
This initiative must be driven by senior LC management and led jointly by the Human Resources Services Directorate and the heads of the Library's major service units. Recommendation: Current staff of the National Digital Library Program should be aggressively recruited for retention and assimilation into the broader Library staff.
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Opportunities for learning could also be created by rotating personnel out for temporary duty in congruent government agencies.
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Recommendation: A formal assessment and report of lessons learned from the Integrated Library System implementation should be prepared and completed by January 1, 2001, with an emphasis on findings that can guide future projects. Recommendation: Human resources staff both in the Human Resources Services Directorate and within the major service units should become agents of change and business partners more rapidly than is foreseen in the HR21 plan.
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did not have particular expertise or experience in library administration or information technology. Recommendation: The committee recommends appointment of a new deputy librarian (Strategic Initiatives)
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Finding: As the Library increasingly outsources its information technology tasks, it will continue to need a strong in-house information technology organization to perform some in-house development, training, support, and operations and to review and monitor these outside contracts as well as to provide technical feedback on proposed contracts. Finding: The Library is underinvesting in the continuing education of its Information Technology Services Directorate staff in technical development and in new skills such as contract management.
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Recommendation: Together, the Library service organizations and its Information Technology Services Directorate should institute service-level agreements based on metrics of system availability, performance, and support requests. These metrics should be used to track ITS Directorate process improvements.
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Network performance is measured on an ad hoc basis at best, so performance information is generally not available when it is really needed. Recommendation: The Information Technology Services Directorate needs to upgrade all of the Library's local area networks to 100 megabit/second Ethernet on an as-soon-as-possible basis rather than on an as-needed basis.
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From page 22... ...
The disaster recovery plan will nearly double the storage requirements. Recommendation: The Library should establish disk-based storage for online data and for an online disaster recovery facility using low-cost commodity disks.
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