7 PLANNING FOR AN OPERATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY

7 PLANNING FOR AN OPERATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY

The activities that constitutes the Alexandria Project may be classified into three groups: research, development, and making ADL an operational library. Our focus through February 29 1996 has clearly been on issues of research and development, and the substance of this focus has been laid out in preceding sections. We strongly believe that we have now developed a solid basis for both our research and our development activities and that the broad lines of much of our future research and development activity are reasonably well laid out.

We are now, therefore, beginning to focus attention on issues relating to the construction of a truly operational DL. Our plans to provide access to the testbed for all users of the WWW is an important step that moves us in the direction of an operational library. As noted above, two conditions that will determine when we provide such access include:

1.  the availability of collections that we judge to have significant value to important subgroups of users;
2.  servers that are sufficiently powerful to provide such users with a timely service.

We are not prepared, however, to call such a system the Alexandria Digital Library since we believe that it critical for the long-term interests of an operational library to begin serious operations with "commercial level" support for the operation and with a relatively full range of DL services, including good access to major collections of useful items. Until we feel that such conditions are fulfilled, therefore, we will call the publicly-available system the Alexandria testbed system.

In order to establish the conditions that we deem necessary for a fully operational DL, we have begun a series of planning activities that go beyond our regular research and development planning activities. The new activities include:

1.  meetings with the UCSB Librarian (Dr. J. Boisse) and the Executive Team of UCSB's Davidson Library to establish strategy and to lay out a course of action that will lead to an operational library;
2.  interactions with relevant members of the whole University of California library system to help plan a development path for Alexandria;
3.  discussions with major providers and users of geographically-referenced materials, such as the USGS, in order to establish the conditions for an operational DL in this area and to establish Alexandria's role in the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).

In particular, a series of meetings have been held with the Executive Team of the University's Davidson Library. The purpose of these meetings has been to begin to plan for implementation of a functioning Project Alexandria. The goal is to make Alexandria available broadly via the Internet in July 1997. The discussions have centered on identifying various questions which must be addressed in this planning effort such as the size and content of the initial database (one reasonable criterion is a "million item collection"); the administrative structure within the library; the staffing and equipment requirements; the costs associated with digitizing unique photographic collections; the method for recovering costs; and copyright issues. We expect these meetings to continue on a bi-weekly basis over the next few months with a detailed plan being developed by summer of 1996.

Another issue of great importance for ADL from a strategic point of view is the issue of sufficient resources to continue our basic research and development activities. It is clear to us of the extent to which the NSF/ARPA/NASA funding is "seed-money" for a project of this magnitude. Therefore we have begun our planning to make a major effort to secure funding that will:

1.  expand our NSF/ARPA/NASA funding base in the fourth year of the project (in addition to relatively minor increments that we have secured from other external sources of funding such as Central Imagery Office and US Navy);
2.  extend the base funding beyond the initial four-year period by seeking major support from a variety of sources, including NSF/ARPA/NASA.