Chair: Eric Stackhouse

Recorder: Marged Dewar

Present: See attached listing

1. Welcome and opening remarks:

Interim Chair of the NSDCI, Eric Stackhouse, opened the meeting by welcoming all those in attendance and introducing members of the Steering Committee who were present: Marged Dewar (Nova Scotia Provincial Library), Vivien Hannon (Electronic Text Centre, Dalhousie University), Louise Spiteri (School of Library and Information Studies, Dalhousie University) and Anjali Vohra.(Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management).

He reviewed the Agenda and the two other documents distributed: the NSDCI brochure designed by Vivien Hannon, and the Rating sheet for potential training or skills development opportunities. Both these items feature the new NSDCI logo.

2. Progress report and future directions:

Eric Stackhouse reviewed the origin of the NSDCI, which developed out of an open meeting hosted by Nova Scotia Provincial Library (NSPL) in May 2002, noting that the first open meeting arose out of public libraries' concerns at a time when growing numbers of community-based projects were being funded through such programs such as LibraryNet, SchoolNet and CAP. This piecemeal approach was fostering lots of activity by a wide range of players, with potential for duplication of effort and an absence of standards-based criteria for projects. When the Provincial Library invited representatives from a wide range of Nova Scotia educational, cultural and government organizations working on digitization initiatives to a meeting for the purpose of sharing information and identifying areas for collaboration, the response was strong across all sectors. That meeting agreed on the need to share information, to register digital projects, and to collaborate on training in order to avoid duplication and to support a standards-based approach.

Several goals identified by the open meeting as priorities for strengthening collaboration have been achieved over the course of the last 2 years. The first priority, development of a web-based digitization resource centre was achieved with the launch of the NSDCI Website on January 17, 2003. Eric recognised the contribution of Bernadette Kennedy, both her work on development of the website as part of the website committee and also as first chair of the Steering Committee.

The website also incorporates another priority from the open meeting, an inventory of digital projects in the province, which has been achieved by contributing to the national inventory, the Inventory of Canadian Digital Initiatives (ICDI). Nova Scotia has 66 projects listed, second only to Quebec.

A third initiative over the last year has been providing opportunities to review and evaluate commercial software products designed to manage digital collections. Interested organizations were able to participate in a pilot of OCLC,s CONTENTdm in November 2003 and a demo of Sirsi's Hyperion in January 2004. While further demonstrations could be useful, any joint purchasing of software is unlikely as the needs of difference organizations differ widely.

Future Goals outlined by the Interim Chair include:

• • Raise awareness - amongst colleagues, communities and funding agencies. There is a need to educate funding agencies to the importance of standards and make a standards-based approach a requirement for funding of new projects.
• •Deliver training and skills development opportunities. The NSDCI includes a wide range of member organizations, what are their needs? Feedback from the players required.
• • Focus on common needs and goals. For example, finding software that could be shared province-wide is not likely an achievable goal at this time. The products in the marketplace have different strengths and are suited to different sectors and types of digital collections. .
• •Build the capacity of the NSDCI Steering Committee

3. Demonstration of the NSDCI website:

Marged Dewar noted that the NSDCI website was created to provide a tool to facilitate information sharing among NSDCI communities of interest; a resource centre for practitioners providing access to standards and current awareness information; and an inventory of Nova Scotia digital projects.

The site is hosted by the Department of Education and maintained by the Nova Scotia Provincial Library. It is designed to be low maintenance and this has been achieved by linking to other sites that are committed to providing the latest in standards and other digitization information. As well, it takes advantage of the national inventory by linking directly into the ICDI and retrieving a subset of Nova Scotia project. Contributing organizations can update and add entries for their own projects themselves, whether these are in the planning stage, in progress or completed. A similar distributed approach also underlies the calendar, where upcoming training or other events can be promoted and shared by submitting information to digitization@ednet.ns.ca. Contact information for members of the Nova Scotia digital community, for the liaison on the Steering Committee for each sector and for the other Steering Committee members is posted, as well as Steering Committee minutes, terms of reference, and goals and objectives.

The development of a web-based resource for the NSDCI members was identified as a top priority by the first open meeting. It is now available, and constitutes a powerful tool for the community. Participants were encouraged to visit the site, check out the resources and communicate via the listserv. Organizations also were encouraged to update their listings in the ICDI inventory. It will be possible to analyse the website usage from Webalizer reports which have recently been activated.

4. Survey of recent digital projects:

Eric Stackhouse used the NSDCI website link into the ICDI to highlight several recent Nova Scotia listings. Many of the Nova Scotia projects listed were entered prior to the NSDCI website launch in January 2003 and Eric encouraged people to add the projects they have initiated since that time. The fact that projects can be entered prior to completion strengthens the role of the inventory in preventing duplication of effort.

5. Call for new members:

Louise Spiteri, Steering Committee Secretary, encouraged those present to consider offering to serve on the Steering Committee. This group is responsible for implementing the priorities of the wider group and organizing projects and events. Those interested were asked to contact either Eric Stackhouse or herself.

A general discussion followed, generating the following suggestions which were referred to the Steering Committee for action:

• •Need for evaluation (statistical and qualitative) of websites. Fiona Black, Acting Director, Dalhousie School of Library and Information Studies suggested that SLIS students could play a role in researching this topic for the NSDCI.
• •Advocacy for digitization, in particular the need for funding for the development of content for digitization
• • Marketing of the NSDCI
• •Dissemination of research and information on the preservation of digital objects

6. The Meeting was adjourned.

Open Meeting April 22, 2004 - Attendance Signup