JISC

JISC managed to get the following exclusive interview with David Seaman, Director of the Digital Library Federation (based in Washington DC). David was attending JISC's Joint Programme Meeting, held in Brighton between 6th - 7th July.  

David, could you just explain a little about the  Digital Library Federation  (DLF)

The DLF is a group of 37 member organisations and institutions, which include the British Library, a number of large American research libraries, such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives. It essentially comprises representatives from a group of very large academic libraries put together in the mid 1990s to focus specifically on the needs of big institutions. 

And what does it do?

Its principle raison d’ etre is to undertake, in partnership, a series of practical initiatives to identify challenges, problems and opportunities. Everything from best practices that record what some of us know, to benchmarks and standards, which in some cases have really taken off, such as the Open Archives Initiative. That provides a straightforward way of exposing digital content in such a way that someone else can come and grab that metadata from lots of sites and build a service, a portal for example. So the work covers preservation, usability, and architectural standards such as OAI. It is by design a relatively small group, the sort of organisation that is meant to be fairly lightweight and nimble with a very small central team. You are talking to a third of it! The real workload gets done by a large network of individuals who come together under the DLF umbrella to work on a number of initiatives 

Could you tell me a little more about your work with European and worldwide organisations and indeed JISC?

It became very evident to us that much of what we work on has no particular geographical boundaries. We saw more and more individuals from non US institutions, getting involved with our work. So last year we made the conscious decision that if we were going to grow it made sense to consciously look outside the US. We fairly quickly identified a small number of libraries with whom we had already had some partnerships and have been approaching them to see if it makes sense to have formal partnerships. The British Library was the first to take up full membership and we have ongoing discussions with others. With JISC, in particular, the fit between our range of interests and yours was so compelling that it makes a lot of sense for us to be allied. 

The one which has the biggest buy-in is a fairly technical project to build a registry of information about file formats. We all realised very quickly that when we started to build institutional repositories to take in all that faculty generated content, that we end up in the business of managing many different file formats. 

From a practical perspective, what main issues you would need to overcome in working with JISC?

These are really issues of translation. We use different words for the same thing. For example you have Virtual Learning Environments and we refer to them as Courseware systems, and Further Education means lifelong learning in the US. There are also some small challenges realising that in the DLF we no longer simply share the same unspoken assumptions such as sources of funding, for example, or about working autonomously. One of the things that we envy about Europe is the ability to work with real national priorities. As we start mixing with a richer group of individuals within these various initiatives, most of the challenges are relate therefore not to technical issues but of outlook and assumption. Often these revolve around funding. 

From what you are saying, it would appear that the technical aspects being addressed through international collaboration are less of an issue than the cultural and social issues

That’s right. There is plenty to keep us busy on the technical side, but our language tends to be much more similar there because it is the language of technology and programming. Our aims and goals and visions are fairly aligned so that helps too. We tend to have the same reasons for building repositories in the States as you would in Europe. 

Is it primarily education that you work with?

The short answer is that it is very much determined by the needs of these very large universities and other entities which fund us. It’s a very clear focus on their issues. Many of those items, however, have much broader applicability, we deal with them in the terms of the needs of a large university, but the metadata harvesting or the production guidance and benchmarks of best practice are really quite generally used.

The other thing to say is that in working with issues I inevitably find myself dealing with other communities, including ones which are much more public, or with publishers or software companies. It is difficult not to include these other representative organisations. 

I understand that you are hoping to enter into a formal partnership agreement with JISC. What do you hope that will achieve in the long term, perhaps three – five years down the line?

We go into this with the full conviction that this will work. I think in this case the range of activities that we see JISC undertaking are so well aligned with our areas of endeavour that there is a very natural synergy. The work you are doing with Courseware (VLEs) and interoperability, is absolutely one of the top things on our list. The problem we run into sometimes is that we consciously battle against missing often significant work going on elsewhere other than in the States, such as in New Zealand or Australia. What JISC will bring amongst other things is great magnification of our ability to keep on track, to hear about things. JISC staff will be a terrific resource to help us locate key individuals with which to work with on new initiatives. There is a good track record already, such as the JISC and the National Science Foundation partnerships. Many of the institutions involved are DLF members, so we already have a good foundation and set of experiences working on these technical and cultural issues on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Do you think that JISC might provide you with an opportunity of expanding your remit to further and secondary education?

It is a slightly complicated question for us. We don’t see a great growth in the core membership of the DLF, as we have plenty of large library organisations that we work with. On the one hand, we have a membership that for the foreseeable future will be defined by very large institutions that are prepared to pay a significant amount of money to make this work and critically have rich staff resources that they can put towards DLF initiatives. The other half of the answer is that for many of our members, particularly the State universities, they work within a landscape of their State education system. They have all sorts of responsibilities to serve, guide and also deliver content to community colleges and smaller institutions. They often have in their mandates, visions and goals the capacity and desire to serve broader education public audiences. State universities are almost always open to the general public who can walk into their libraries and use the facilities. So we see those issues coming up on the DLF agenda not because we have members from those communities but because of the roundabout way that they are served. 

David, we wish  you all the very best with the partnership and thank you for your time

We look forward to benefiting greatly from working with JISC.