He went on to say that these collections create a platform that supports not only the collection itself but also other connections.  He quoted Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media, who believed in creating ” a generative platform for undefined future uses”.  Such platforms must be open and support APIs. They must also be able to disclose their metadata as another means of exploring the collection that can “enable or disable” forms of inquiry.

These observations certainly ring true with CDL’s experience in aggregating collections and supporting platforms for their use, such as for eScholarship or Calisphere.  While these services may have once been focused on becoming portals, now they are more aligned with being platforms supporting a range of uses.  We know that most users arrive not through the front door but from a referral in another source or from a web search engine.  Objects need to be able to stand on their own rather than relying on an organized pathway to their place in the collection.  They must provide context to reveal the larger collection or their related associates within it.  But there is more to be done to enable those “undefined future uses” if we think about how the text (in the case of eScholarship) and the metadata could be mined, or how to take advantage of commentary and corrections from users.  We should focus on other ways to make these services function “at the network level” or to think about the web first, something Cohen noted as a principle when designing new services.  The problem to solve these days is not discovery but how to provide context and the means to select and filter, either within the service itself or to allow others to do so.  Search facets have been used for this purpose, but there are other methods to reveal the peaks and valleys within a collection and to enable deeper exploration.  Part of our curatorial role is to analyze collections and be open to having others analyze them, to help shape them for future scholarship.

The DataUp Project. The University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library continued to produce useful tools and services in support of digital preservation with DataUp, “an open source tool helping researchers document, manage, and archive their tabular data… within the scientist’s workflow.”

End of Term Web Archive. The End of Term 2012 project got underway to capture U.S. Government websites between the first and second administration of President Barack Obama. Project partners include the California Digital Library, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, University of North Texas Libraries and the U.S. Government Printing Office.

We have also been participating through meetings and briefings in the development of another project on the list, the Digital Preservation Network.

The rest of this “Top Ten” list is equally impressive and it is heartening to realize that so much has been accomplished in the area of digital preservation in our community. Yet I can’t help but note that it can still be a hard sell to administrators to justify new or increased expenditures for something that seems abstract, unpredictable and never ending. This challenge was magnified for me recently when I presented a paper in December, 2012 at the 3rd conference on Cultural Heritage online – Trusted Digital Repositories & Trusted Professionals in Florence, Italy.

The conference began with a parade of local officials and cultural heritage ministers from the city and region, all extolling the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the digital age. Indeed, the commitment to preservation is everywhere in this city that was the heart of the Renaissance, its museums and public places overflowing with the riches of the past. I was particularly struck by the exhibits at the Galileo Museum

Sundials, Galileo Museum, Florence

where the artifacts and experimental documentation of not only Galileo but also his contemporaries were showcased in spectacular fashion. Even with all of the support given to cultural heritage, the Italians at the conference still feel they need to shore up digital preservation, but they were focusing on standards and compliance more than on basic funding.

My presentation, on the other hand, was about how we have shifted from talking about preservation as an ultimate and costly activity to curation as part of the ongoing process of creating and managing digital content. We must be aware of incentives—such as mandates from funders and publishers rather than government initiatives–for our researchers to practice good stewardship of their research output. Thus we have invested in tools such as the DataUP mentioned by LC as well as the Data Management Planning Tool (DMPTool which made the 2011 Top Ten list), EZID (which won the DataCite 2012 Gold Award for assigning more than 250,000 DOIs (digital object identifiers) in one year), and the Web Archiving Service to make it digital content easier to manage when it comes time to preserve it for the future. After all, today’s research can become tomorrow’s cultural heritage and think what we would be missing if we weren’t able to see what Galileo was up to.

But there is another key question that lingers for me. Who is the user community or audience?

Most national libraries are mandated to be the library of record for their country’s cultural and intellectual output. The audience is the citizenry, and in most cases also the government. In that sense, it is easier for other countries to develop the digital equivalent of a national library. In fact, CDL exchanges solutions with many national libraries on the problems of capturing web-based publications which have been used in the Web Archiving Service and other digital library tools. The challenge for these libraries to collect their national output, while daunting, at least has a defined limit. In the U.S., for better or worse, no institution has the cultural or organizational authority to create a national library. Instead, our output resides in a large network populated by all types of libraries, each serving a targeted user community.

For research libraries, the answer to the audience question is “scholars”, whether they are students seeking knowledge or the faculty creating new scholarship. Faculty members have worldwide interests, colleagues and connections; their research clearly doesn’t stop at their own campus or even at the wider borders of UC. Universities inherently are about going beyond national and cultural boundaries.

Part of CDL’s vision is to “elevate the digital library to become expansively global” to stay in alignment with the needs of its primary audience. We seek to fulfill this vision in numerous ways such as the Next Generation Melvyl pilot which aims to expand the library catalog for our scholars from the 33 million items in the current version of Melvyl to 210 million items from 72,000 libraries worldwide.

The other side of this global reach is the desire by our faculty to communicate their work to the world. Recently we conducted a survey of scholars using eScholarship, which provides open access publishing services for UC. The main reasons scholars cited for using the services were to achieve broader dissemination of their work—individually and for academic research in general, and to others in their field as well as those in developing countries and even to non-academic practitioners.

CDL also participates in international conversations and organizations such as DataCite in order to support scholarly needs that may differ by discipline but share commonalities across countries. And our participation in the NSF funded DataOne brings us into contact with scientists who aim to “ensure the preservation and access to multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national science data” related to the environment.

Another initiative, HathiTrust began with common goals and audience—to serve the needs of scholars in creating a shared digital library. Now with more than 50 libraries in the U.S. and one international partner, HathiTrust brings an unparalleled opportunity to move beyond a national view. As Paul Courant notes, “Libraries, to the extent that their collection efforts are purposeful—and mostly they are—acquire what is intellectually and culturally important, and what is wanted or needed by their clients. This is reflected in the fact that more than 50 percent of the content in the HathiTrust Digital Library—whose partners as of this writing all reside in the United States—is written in a language other than English.” With the extension to international libraries, the breadth and depth of this library will only grow. Yet without an audience focus, even one as expansive as the interests of scholars, it is difficult to be all things to all people.

Even more so than for the content itself, the demands of the primary audience will shape the services surrounding it. Scholars care about the particular, the unique, and the unusual as much as they seek patterns, repetition and form. They seek the long tail and long time horizons. They value complete and accurate metadata and tools to delve deeply into the content of the texts. Many of the services to support their desires would be difficult for single institutions to justify or sustain, yet a collaborative approach already has yielded impressive results and promises even more if the new partners are willing to contribute.

Is it better to look to a coalition of like-minded institutions focused on the expansive possibilities of scholarly research than to start with a national view? Could we imagine a public library of similar proportions or does the audience for public library services demand a more deeply local perspective? Could we have the best of all worlds with something like Europeana to unite various digital libraries, regardless of their audience allegiance? Darnton acknowledges that existing digital libraries could be “useful and instructive” in creating a national digital library: “Think of HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, the Knowledge Commons Initiative, the California Digital Library, the Digital Library Federation, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, and other nonprofit enterprises”. Perhaps we already have the makings of an enterprise that allows each component to do what it does best for its own audience. Could we agree on a vision to unite them virtually for a common purpose, not merely to define a national boundary, but to create the basis for a truly global digital library?

Our new graphics and better search and navigation features are not just the equivalent of granite countertops and stainless appliances that bring cosmetic improvements.  In the case of the search engine, we have upgraded to our own tool, XTF (eXtensible Text Framework).  Not only is it a sophisticated search engine, it also allows us to experience first-hand what users of our services (such as Calisphere and eScholarship) encounter, as well as other institutions that use this open source software.  By experiencing it ourselves, we can continue to improve it.

As with any good logo, I hope our new graphic inspires a range of creative interpretations.  I believe it embodies our approach of providing services throughout the research life cycle and it suggests the partnerships that are so vital to our work.  As you explore CDL’s services, you will see (through graphics in addition to words) how our work reflects these characteristics.

Another focus that I am particularly proud of is the many ways you can meet our staff.  One message we heard loud and clear from our constituents is that they want to know who does what, who to contact, and what kind of expertise they offer.  Through the listings of project teams, document owners, contact names, and especially staff profiles, you can now meet our impressive cast of characters.  You’ll find librarians of course, but also linguists, artists, photographers, mathematicians, musicians, technologists, architects (of virtual spaces), and even a pharmacist.  They have skills in negotiating, project planning, marketing, publishing, information design and architecture, software development, analysis, technology management, communication, and most of all, collaboration.

You can also hear what they have to say through blogs and other social media such as Twitter and Facebook as well as their more formal publications.

I invite you to explore our new space, meet our staff, and collaborate with us to develop digital library solutions.