Excuse the cross-posting.
My colleagues and I are faced with a question and thought members of the
digital library community could help.
Have any libraries become active in capturing digital content from external
organizations and hosting it locally?
By capturing digital content, I don’t mean wholesale harvesting from other
servers, but rather managing individual items that library
selectors/collection development people have identified and want to include
as part of the libraries’ digital collection.
Licensing or rights issues aside, does anyone see a reason to locally host
(for example) a free e-book or other PDF or related digital format? I guess
example would be books from the Internet Archive or maybe National Academy
Press (again, assuming that rights issues are worked out).
For some content, this assumes that for one reason or another selectors do
not want an external link to the content but rather want the item hosted on
their own server.
How about theses or dissertations not produced by your institution but
purchased in digital rather than paper form?
Can you think of a scenario where you would want to host content locally
that is freely available elsewhere (except as a mirror or dark
archive/preservation solution)?
I’ve searched the listserv archives and the only discussions I’ve seen
coming close to this topic are:
· The Google Books partners who are hosting their own converted
digital content and presumably have come up with some solutions.
· A discussion of perpetual access to e-journal content
but I haven’t seen anyone address acquiring, cataloging and providing access
to single digital objects for library users. It might be material that you
value more than the creator and don’t trust them to keep it online and
available in perpetuity. It could be material you purchase but keeping a CD
in the library obviously does not provide the access that we’ve all come to
expect.
That’s the first part of my query: See who has done or thought about doing
(or rejected after thinking about doing) this kind of thing.
If anyone has begun hosting content in this way, then I have more specific
questions regarding storage, metadata, persistent URLs, etc. that really
represent the heart of what we’re wrestling with.
Thanks in advance for any replies,
Suzanne Pilsk and Alvin Hutchinson
Received on Mon Sep 27 2010 - 12:43:51 EDT