Information Alliance - Spring 2002 - Minutes
Lake Cumberland State Park, Kentucky
May 13, 2002

We had representatives from three working groups discuss their projects, plans and ideas. The three groups were the Digital Initiatives and Preservation group; the Shared Expertise group; and the Web Projects, Portals, and Knowledge Management group.

Bill Britten from the University of Tennessee presented information about the digital projects and collections at UT and suggested a few ways for the institutions to cooperate on digital projects such as collaborating on best practices for record-keeping, metadata applications, and database management.

Bill Hook from Vanderbilt University discussed some of the digital collections and projects at Vanderbilt and suggested a cooperative purchase of a high-quality digital camera that could be used by all three institutions.

Eric Weig, Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Kentucky, showed the Kentuckiana collection and other digital projects at UK. Beth Kraemer is working on electronic theses and dissertations at Kentucky.

David Carpenter from Vanderbilt presented work form the Shared Expertise working group. They have developed a form for personnel at each library to fill out and submit which will contain information about subject area assignments and areas of expertise and interest with wh ich they would be willing to help. The information would be contained in a Web-accessible database at Vanderbilt. The database will be searchable, so we can find our counterparts more easily.

Maribeth Manoff from the University of Tennessee discussed the visit of Sarah Thomas to UTK and what an academic Web portal might look like. She discussed library-focused Web projects such as MetaLib and the implementation of SFX and MyLibrary projects. She also mentioned the possibility of cooperative work among the three institutions for subject pages sponsored by the subject librarians.

After lunch, we heard an announcement that LAMA will sponsor workshops if we come up with an idea. We discussed what types of workshops we could develop for the Information Alli ance and decided to hold that sponsorship in mind for when we have a workshop idea.

Instead of breaking into small groups, we stayed in one group and generated ideas for next steps in our list of priority items. The ideas generated include: METS training with a national expert; discussion of OAI strategies; sharing preservation information and ideas.

By the end of the discussion of next steps for Digital Initiatives and Preservation, the Digital Initiatives and Preservation group were charged with developing a (one day) conference for the Information Alliance meeting for spring or fall of 2003 dealing with Administration and Preservation of Digital Objects.

Ideas for more possible cooperative projects include: the development of a form or a template that that the three institutions could use to submit metadata electronically for the ETD projects. Beth Kraemer, Anthony Smith, and Jody Combs will confer on this project.

During the discussion concerning the database for shared expertise, it was decided that staff would be included in the database, too. We can include projects we are working on, memberships in organizations, and where we went to library school.

Also mentioned was redesign of the Alliance Web page, but no ideas or suggestions were forthcoming. Send suggestions to Margaret Casado at UT or Tamara Miller, also at UT.

In the discussion about Web projects/portals/knowledge management, the topic of cooperative Web-accessible subject pages was mentioned. A group will work on the feasibility of this idea and come up with proposals concerning the structure of such pages and which subjects would be most likely to be successful. The working group can consult user studies to determine how the users like to access subject pages.

During the discussion of portals, it was suggested that a working group should be formed which could communicate with other ARL schools to see how portals are being used in those environments and report back to the large group.

Ideas for additional potential cooperative projects include: collaborating on research projects such as user behavior; usability studies; and assessment measures (other than and including LibQual). We could also study and compare internal staff Web pages, virtual reference projects, and projects involving audio reserves.