Community Building for the Digital Library

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Digital Library Projects
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		Bringing our users into our design process is a key part of our work. We do this in various ways, including: a faculty advisory group that we consult with on digital library developments a new "try this out!" prototypes page, where users can try projects in development and give feedback. We also maintain contact addresses for feedback on our regular web pages, and respond to user questions and suggestions. data collection on resource usage. Some of this comes from automatically logged data (which we keep private and confidential). For some projects, we also survey groups of users to find out what works best for them.
Communities of Interest		Communities of interest, built around scholarly disciplines or interdisciplinary collaboration, can form important consituencies for library development. We are developing services that allow users to locate resources relevant to particular communities of interest (see, for instance, our new materials prototype). We also are considering developing services to help people in these communities collaborate, and select especially relevant resources.
Computer Science Research		Computer science research is an important part of advanced digital library development. We have a computer scientist on the Library staff who does research and development in software architectures for digital libraries, and digital library applications using open architecture. He also works with the CIS department here at Penn, where researchers are doing important work in semi-structured data, data provenance, linguistic analysis, and other research areas related to digital libraries.
English Renaissance in Context (ERIC)		English Renaissance in Context (ERIC) ERIC is a three-year, NEH funded project to create a web site presenting ways in which Shakespeare's plays can be taught utilizing digital facsimiles of original sources and documents. It is a collaborative project involving the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) at Penn and the Penn Library's Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI) and comprises two distinct components: a set of self-paced tutorials that raise a variety of issues for students, and an introduction to the printing and publishing context of the English Renaissance. ERIC is part of a larger collaborative effort between SAS and the Library to create a major archive of digital facsimiles relating to the English Renaissance, one of the areas of particular strength both among the faculty and in the Library. A completed prototype will be available by the summer, 2001. Results to date can be viewed at: http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/collections/furness/eric.
Participation in Library Consortia		Participation in library consortia includes collaborations with the Research Libraries Group in developing standards for digital preservation and in sharing cultural metadata, and with the Digital Library Federation in metadata harvesting testbeds, and in open-source initiatives (described below). We also are working with partners to make it easier for users to request materials from any of several libraries.
Open Archives Initiative Testbed		The Library is participating in a DLF-sponsored project to make digital collection metadata harvestable via the Open Archives Initiative. More lightweight than shared cataloging, and more selective and farther-reaching than generic web-page harvesting, the Open Archives Initiative allows metadata on digital objects to be made public in a variety of formats (Dublin Core, MARC, etc.), encoded as XML. This metadata can then be queried by value-added services that can select sets of particular interest to them, including newly added or changed metadata, to notify interested users or build searchable specialized catalogs. This Initiative (and the Library's participation) is still at the experimental level, but may help scholars register and find scholarly communication throughout the Internet more easily than they can today. For more information, contact John Mark Ockerbloom, our Digital Library Architect and Planner (ockerblo@pobox.upenn.edu).
Open Source Software Development		Open source software development allows libraries to collaborate on designing and building systems that meet their needs, share them freely, and adapt them for local needs. It provides an alternative to the often limited "black box" software available commercially. At Penn, we are releasing much of our software (such as TOM) as open source, and aim to encourage the growth of the library open source software community.
Borrow Direct		Borrow Direct is a pilot project that lets users at Columbia, Penn, and Yale get access to books in any of these universities' collections more quickly and easily, and with less expense, than traditional interlibrary loan. In 2001, we hope to continue this project with more advanced software and additional university partners. See this page for more details.
Free Access to Knowledge		We believe that knowledge should not be confined to academia or paying customers, but instead, where possible, made available to educate and enlighten all people. Here are some of the ways we promote public access: Our SCETI collection is accessible free of charge for all Internet users, as are all of our other locally digitized collections where we are not required to restrict access due to copyrights held by others. The On-Line Books Page, a project run by John Mark Ockerbloom of the Library, allows users to find over 13,000 freely accessible digital books now available on the Internet. It also includes information to help people put more books on-line themselves. A Celebration of Women Writers, edited by volunteer Mary Mark Ockerbloom, is a sister site to The On-Line Books Page that has digitally published about 150 books by women, making them freely accessible to all. The site also includes a database of web-accessible material by and about women writers. The Library also supports fair use and sensible intellectual property laws that aid in the progress of scholarship, rather than hindering it.