ALA’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group, which tackles ebook-related issues, is seeking feedback from individuals who experiment with the creation, publication, and preservation of digital content. The deadline to participate in the survey is Friday, June 1.
We are looking for digitization effort experiments that can help ALA recommend policies, address issues, or promote information exchange about this emerging area.
What We Need
By Friday, June 1, email dcwg-input@ala.org with:
- A brief description of your institution’s efforts to create digital content. For instance, this might include Open Access scholarship, the co-creation of ePub files featuring local authors, or the unique gathering of local history photographs and/or oral histories.
- Some key observations of important issues, roadblocks, and discoveries. For instance, what group of authors or publishers have you worked with directly? Which approaches do you believe to be important to your institution or our profession? At what point has your project moved from your own agency to a larger consortial environment, and why?
- Where do you think ALA could make a difference? Have your issues been legal (dealing with copyright, for instance), technical (defining file type standards), policy (guiding documents), political within your institution or region, and/or financial (you just need more money)? Or have you found new concerns worth noting?
- A contact email and phone number if we have questions.
Our subgroup will then review the responses, meet to discuss them at the 2012 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, and then select a few key studies and issues for further examination. It is our plan to share our findings and recommendations broadly, concluding our work by the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle.
Thank you for your assistance in this important investigation.
Jamie LaRue
chair, DCWG Subgroup #2
and director, Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries