VIVA Special Collections Committee
Minutes

In light of the January weather conditions it was decided to have an "electronic" meeting.

Topics for discussion:

1. Proposals for "general" projects for consideration of the Steering Committee if there is "excess" funding available.

   Several areas of common interest have been proposed--regional, Civil War--but projects are dependent upon funding availability for hardware and staff.

2. In light of several issues that came up soon after the SC homepage was mounted it was decided to establish written procedures and "policies". First among these is that it was our intention to provide direct access to the Special Collections of the institutions, after that it was up to the institution to make the internal links. None of us wish to be placed in the position of attempting to tell a university how they have to arrange their Web materials. Therefore, it was generally agreed that we will work on a P&P document to aid in further devlopment in a consistent fashion of VIVA SC WWW materials.

   Gail has volunteered to begin work on some of these issues since she is currently working with John Duke and Kathy Perry on related matters.

   For future dicussion: someone to take responsibility for monitoring our site.

3. Committee agreed that VIVA SCC provides oversight and coordination of electronic SC materials to be made available through links to institutions. Once the link is made, however, internal connections, placement and routing is determined by the institution.

   Participation from as many Virginia educational (libraries, museums and historical societies) institutions as possible is to be encouraged.

4. Members were reminded to check their sites to make sure, barring technical difficulties out of our control, that we have fulfilled our obligations to have several images and at least one collection available for viewing by the General Assembly. Great appreciation was expressed for Gail's work on coordinating and designing the main SC page.

5. Generally agreed that future projects (full text) undertaken by SCC will be general in scope to be as inclusive as possible given the limitations imposed by copyright. General topics to be decided upon by the committee, institutions are responsible for the selection and work. It is understood that funding proposals will go through the Steering Committee but that hardware, software and staffing requests are all considered eligible.

   Future plans. Where do we go from here? Generally agreed that we should continue as general overseers (so to speak) and implimentors of "general" projects but now that VIVA Special Collections is up and operational we may want to step back get a few collections up and running and then do some planning on how much can be done for what $$ and what type of materials can be done in full text, etc.

6. Gail, Kay and Betsy will be the panelists for the VIVA session at the College Park meeting of MARAC (MAy 2-5, 1996.).

7. Annoucements

   John

   Directory of Repositories in Virginia, the LVA has received completed survey forms from more than 200 repositories. With help from Elizabeth Roderick and others, we are developing a template for data entry and an architecture for the Directory. If you wish to take a look at it, the URL is http://leo.vsla.edu/reposit/reposit.html. Your comments would be appreciated.

   Also, the Library of Virginia plans to announce shortly access to the several digital initiative projects of the past year, including finding aids to several collections and expanded access to the Virginia Colonial Records Project. These all will be accessible through the LVA Home Page, so revision of the LVA links on the VIVA Special Collections Home Page should not be necessary. The plan was make the announcement coincide with ALA Midwinter.

   Gail

   At our March meeting (wherever it will be held) I'll bring lots of information about digitizing projects but much of the expense will be in personnel and equipment. Briefly, I'm back from Cornell (both mentally and physically) where I had a very intense training experience--like nothing before. I'll report more fully when we next meet, or through a later e-mail message, since I'm not caught up at work yet. We worked at least 10-11 hours a day in the workshop, doing homework, reading, group assignments, and lab assignments; and we began at 7pm Saturday night!

   Digitizing is not: slap it on the scanner, press the scan button, and store it. Projects of all sizes take careful planning, and for projects to be used in RFPs, grants, etc., I learned a lot about what to expect, what questions to ask, how to interpret what bidders/vendors say they can do, and lots more. All of this I want to pass on to you (in great detail).

   Anne Kenney said that she is interested in taking this workshop on the road, but she doesn't want to think about it until the last one is over in March.

8. New business

   Gail suggested that we could benefit from someone attending this summer's CETH workshop. Would VIVA fund this?

   Kay brought up the point of future maintenance of our site. Gail has been doing it all lately, but is she willing to continue in this capacity and should she? This issue has futher implications on the future of the entire VIVA project but should be considered. At the very least, we need to make this arrangement official.

9. Next meeting will be on March 8, 1996 at Virginia Tech, 11:30 am. Directions and agenda to be distributed.

Respectfully submitted,

Betsy

HTML mark-up March 22, 1996
http://spec.lib.vt.edu/viva/minutes9601.html