Center For Research Libraries Research Articles

Everything, for ever? The preservation of South African websites for future research and scholarship

The amount of material published on the worldwide web continues to grow. This is also true of South Africa. Much of this material is banal and ephemeral, but it nevertheless forms part of South Africa's documentary heritage. It will have value for future historians and social scientists just as previous centuries’ printed broadsheets, newspapers and ‘penny horribles’ are used today as raw material for research. The proliferation of websites worldwide poses enormous challenges to heritage institutions such as national, research and repository libraries. In the developed countries the capturing, organization and preservation of websites have become an important theme in the professional literature of information science. Many difficulties have to be overcome before we can be sure that an adequate proportion of this material is preserved for future use. The difficulties are not only of a technical nature, but also organizational, economic, political, legal and ethical. This paper draws on experience gained in two current projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The first is the Political Communications Web Archiving Project, undertaken in the United States under the aegis of the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, which has attempted to develop a model for the preservation of websites for use by area studies researchers at US universities. The second is a South African project on the legal deposit of electronic publications, managed by the Foundation for Library and Information Service Development (FLISD) on behalf of the National Library of South Africa. The paper outlines the major issues that have to be addressed when a national system for the preservation of websites is set up, with special emphasis on ‘soft’ issues (political, legal and moral) rather than technical issues.

Preserving American Print Resources

PurposeAims to provide a background to the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)'s Preserving America's Print Resources (PAPR) initiative.Design/methodology/approachDescribes the CRL conference and planning event, entitled “Preserving America's print resources: toward a national strategic effort”, held in Chicago, July 2003 and highlights some of the programs on which the CRL are working.FindingsAffirms the CRL's role of “convening” and facilitating strategic action by the major North American research libraries and libraries of last resort to enable the community to move deliberatively and safely away from excessive redundancy in its print holdings. The goal is to enable North American libraries to act in concert, to make the best use of scarce resources, and to provide for scholars of the future the most rich and diverse pool of knowledge possible.Originality/valuePromoting the worthy goal of enabling North American libraries to act in concert, to make the best use of scarce resources, and to provide for scholars of the future the most rich and diverse pool of knowledge possible is central to the Center's mission. The PAPR conference reaffirmed the importance of this role for the years ahead.

Paving the Way for Print Repositories Through Electronic Access

SUMMARY Mary Jo Zeter and Jeanne Drewes from Michigan State University presented an overview of the state of print repositories. The presenters provided a brief history of the move toward print repositories, outlined reasons for inclusion of print serials, and discussed the impact that electronic formats are having on print repositories. Ms. Zeter and Ms. Drewes discussed initiatives by the Center for Research Libraries and provided specific recommendations for the planning and development of a national repository system.

Preserving America’s print resources: toward a national strategic effort – report on the planning day discussions

Presents a report from the conference Preserving America’s Printed Resources: The Roles of Repositories, Depositories, and Collections of Record, organized by the Center for Research Libraries. This was a two‐part event held in Chicago, 21‐22 July 2003, and this report summarizes the second part, which was an extended discussion on the theme of repositories and collections of record, asking “How can libraries work together to optimize management of the nation’s knowledge resources in printed form?” The intended outcome of the discussion was to be an agenda consisting of realistic near‐ and long‐term national‐level actions, and identifying the appropriate participants in those activities and the roles those participants might play.

Digitizing Geosciences Information Proposal and Report for the Center for Research Libraries Working Group on Cooperative Collection Development in Science and Technology

ABSTRACT A Center for Research Libraries working group on cooperative collection development in the sciences and technology identified the geosciences as a domain whose current and historical publications make ideal candidates for a digitization demonstration project, due to their utility and the diverse nature of their text, tables and images. State geological surveys engage in some of the most important and practical fieldwork undertaken by geologists. State geological surveys and maps have had a critical impact in the discovery, exploration, use and conservation of natural resources. As a consequence, close to 2,000 selected publications from the states of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming were chosen for the scope, quality and variety exhibited in them. The eighteen-month digitization pilot project will, upon conclusion, design a self-sustaining model for a continuation program.

Common cause: Taking care of print collections

Drawing from information gathered by Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and published by Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in the report Developing Print Repositories: Models for Shared Preservation and Access, this talk sets the context for the day's discussions by focusing on the challenges to building and sustaining these types of print repositories. Discussion will focus on identifying key elements of the infrastructure needed to support such repositories; economic incentives to cooperate in supporting these repositories; and the roles and responsibilities of those who provide such services and those who benefit from them.

Common cause: Taking care of print collections

Drawing from information gathered by Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and published by Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in the report Developing Print Repositories: Models for Shared Preservation and Access, this talk sets the context for the day's discussions by focusing on the challenges to building and sustaining these types of print repositories. Discussion will focus on identifying key elements of the infrastructure needed to support such repositories; economic incentives to cooperate in supporting these repositories; and the roles and responsibilities of those who provide such services and those who benefit from them.

Das “Center for Research Libraries” in Chicago

Presentation du consortium CRL, consortium de bibliotheques de recherche d'universites, d'etablissements d'enseignement superieur et de bibliotheques de recherche independantes d'Amerique du Nord.

News from the Hemingway Collection

- NEWS FROM THE HEMINGWAY COLLECTION JAMESM. ROTH The John F. Kennedy Library Hemingway Foundation/PENAward On Sunday, 13 April 2003, the Kennedy Library hosted the annual Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, America's best-known prize for a distinguished first book of fiction, and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Held in the Smith Center, the ceremony began at 3 pm. Patrick Hemingway, son of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, presented the award to Gabriel Brownstein for his book, The Curious Case ofBenjamin Button, Apt. 3W (W. W. Norton & Company), and former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky delivered the keynote speech. The judges for the award were Percival Everett, Maureen Howard, and Jim Shepard. A reception followed the ceremony in the Pavilion, and the Hemingway Research Room was open for tours. In winning the award, Gabriel Brownstein joins an esteemed list of winners, including Justin Cronin for his warm and powerful collection of stories, Mary and O'Neil, Akhil Sharma for his remarkable and bold novel, An Obedient Father, Jhumpa Lahiri for her short story collection, Interpreter ofMaladies, Marilynne Robinson for Housekeeping, Susan Power for The Grass Dancer, Louis Begley for Wartime Lies, and Chang-rae Lee for Native Speaker. The $7,500 annual award was founded in 1976 by late PEN member Mary Hemingway to honor the memory of her husband and to draw attention to first books of fiction. Since Mary Hemingway's death in 1986, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation has continued to fund the award from the endowment she created. Administered by PEN, the only worldwide organization of writers, editors, and publishers, the award ceremony was moved to the John F. Kennedy Library through the efforts of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1992. In 1995, the Ucross Foundation, a residence for the Hemingway review, vol. 22, no. 2, spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Publishedbythe University ofIdaho Press, Moscow, Idaho. 118 ¦ THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW artists and writers located in Clearmont, Wyoming, began offering expense-paid residences to the winner, runners-up, and alternates. The Hemingway Foundation, the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, the John F. Kennedy Foundation, PEN New England, the Friends of the Hemingway Collection, the Boston Globe, and the Ucross Foundation sponsor the ceremony and reception. John F. Kennedy Library Works Toward Préservation ofHemingway Papers in Cuba The Rockefeller Foundation has awarded $75,000 to the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council Working Group on Cuba to fund an initial one-year phase of a two to three year initiative intended to promote preservation and conservation of an important collection of Ernest Hemingway's papers that remain in Cuba. The Working Group on Cuba will manage the grant and the project in close collaboration with its Standing Committee on Cuban Libraries and Archives and an advisory council composed of those who envisaged the project and negotiated its early stages. Central partner institutions include the Hemingway Museum outside of Havana, the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, the National Archives of Cuba and the José Martí National Library of Cuba, the National Council of Cuban Cultural Patrimony, and the Cuban Ministry of Culture. The Northeast Document Conservation Center will help to carry out the preservation training and oversee work at the Finca Vigía, Hemingway's former residence located on the outskirts of Havana. The materials currently housed in the Hemingway Museum at the Finca Vigía constitute a large and important collection until now inaccessible to American and other scholars. In a critical state ofdeterioration, the collection contains, among other materials, Hemingway manuscripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, ephemera and a substantial collection ofbooks, many with marginalia by Hemingway. At present, these materials have been removed,from public access in an attempt to slow their deterioration, underscoring the urgencyofthe initiative to restore, preserve, and conserve the materials. Only in so doingcanwe ensure access to thisvitalresourceforscholars inthe United States, Cuba, and aroundtheworld, aswell as forthe greaterpublic. Although the Kennedy Library is best known for its 36 million documents related to President Kennedy and mid-20tri century American his- NEWS EROM THE HEMINGWAY COLLECTION · 119 tory, in fact 15 to 20...

"The New Dynamic and Economics of Cooperative Collection Development" Conference co-sponsored by The Center for Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries, November 8-10, 2002

"The New Dynamic and Economics of Cooperative Collection Development" Conference co-sponsored by The Center for Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries, November 8-10, 2002

Colonial Latin American Resources at the Center for Research Libraries

Colonial Latin American Resources at the Center for Research Libraries

Digital Collections at the Center for Research Libraries

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has been assessing its strategies for providing services relating to electronic resources. Just as CRL meets a need for preserving newspapers that are overlooked by commercial micropublishers, for example, it can also play a role in digitizing underrepresented but important resources that merit wider attention or would better serve the scholarly community as electronic resources. Using this principle, CRL currently has two major digitization projects underway and several others under consideration. A possible additional role for the Center in the future is as an aggregator of digital collections.

National Provision of Newspapers: A Brief Survey

The output of newspapers worldwide is huge. Problems of collection and availability, and in particular preservation, confront libraries of all kinds, particularly national libraries, since newspapers are usually printed on poor quality paper. Transfer to another medium has to occur before the original is lost; and microfilm has been seen as the preferred method of accomplishing this. According to a survey carried out by IFLA in 1996, 32 countries have a separate catalogue for newspapers and a further 15 countries with national libraries cite newspapers within a general catalogue. There are many examples of cooperative activities both within and between countries, resulting among other things in the creation of union catalogues. A Working Group of the International Coalition on Newspapers (ICON) is working on a Database of International Newspapers. This will be a web-accessible database of the titles and holdings of participants in the Center for Research Libraries in the USA, together with holdings information from ICON participants. The ICON Preservation Project will identify and microfilm newspapers from outside the US that have not yet been microfilmed. Commercial companies are increasingly interested in investing in scanning older newspapers, creating digital files which can be searched.

African Newspaper Union List: low‐tech resource/high‐tech access

Describes the development of the African Newspaper Union List by the Africana Librarians Council of the African Studies Association, in conjunction with the Center for Research Libraries. The process involved selecting a project which was attractive to funding agencies, effectively addressed a real problem of Africana libraries, and would not overburden already busy staff at the participating libraries. The difficulties that had to be overcome included the challenge of developing a high‐tech project for librarians whose main experience with technology was limited to its use in library service, not its design and implementation. Other challenges were the nature of the problems of acquiring publications from Africa, and the small pool of participating librarians who were widely scattered geographically, each in quite different institutional settings.

Forging the Future for Archival Concerns and Resource Sharing

Summary This workshop presented a brief history, current projects, and some future goals of the Center for Research Libraries, which is based in Chicago, Illinois. Participants were invited to share their ideas on the many aspects of consortia development via a questionnaire and discussion.

Six Ways from Sunday: Approaches to Indexing Digital Text Images

In 1994, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded a joint project undertaken by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and the Latin American Microfilm Project (LAMP) to scan and index over three-hundred thousand pages of microfilmed Brazilian Government Documents for the Internet. Due to the collection size, format, language and poor physical condition of the text, entering this overwhelmingly textual collection as full-text was prohibitively expensive. Instead the documents were scanned as images, thereby maintaining the intellectual content of the collection, but losing the dynamic searching capabilities inherent in full-text databases. A combination of indexing approaches was used to provide access to these documents. Indexing (table-of-contents, pagination and subject indexes) found in the documents were recreated to give users access to the documents. A controlled vocabulary was established to index a portion of the database. The factors of costs, user feedback and available technologies all influenced the choices of the five indexes ultimately utilized. This paper will describe and comment on the strengths and weaknesses of the various indexing approaches taken to access the images within this database.

The Role of the Center for Research Libraries in the History and Future of Cooperative Collection Development

Almost fifty years ago, when the organization that now is the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) was founded, university and research libraries were facing issues similar to those challenging them today: lack of space in libraries to shelve growing collections; new library materials formats to absorb into acquisitions budgets; more or more expensive research materials to which patrons needed access. In 1949, higher education looked for solutions in cooperative programs. CRL evolved as a unique endeavor-a program for cooperative collection development and a library that acquires and makes available essential research materials. CRL has endured because of its members' commitment, the gradual building of a unique, centralized library collection, and the organization's capacity to serve as a coordinator for cooperative decisions and implementation of programs. These strengths will support CRL into the future.

The Center for Research Libraries and Cooperative Collection Development

The environment for cooperative collection efforts has significantly altered in the last five years due to online public access catalogs, technology changes, and economic realities. One of the most effective mechanisms for establishing a cooperative collection agenda including providing access to a much richer bank of resources, making the most economical use of funds, and setting a shared political agenda is the establishment of library consortia. The changes that have made this a viable model are considered in light of the role of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) as a partner in the cooperative collection development agenda.

Africana at the Center for Research Libraries: A Survey of Collections and Access

This essay presents a current survey of the Africana research holdings and collections that are available at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) located at Chicago, Ill. The collection is composed of many formats of material, including foreign dissertations, monographs, newspapers, periodicals, official publications, pamphlets, political ephemera, manuscripts and archives, and miscellaneous materials. Each of these formats is described in the essay, including examples, collection development guidelines, and information on access. The primary institutional focus for the collection of these materials has been the Cooperative Africana Microform Program (CAMP). Over the past thirty-five years, representatives from the various CAMP member institutions have selected materials to be purchased or filmed. These decisions have reflected the changing research priorities and needs of the various individuals and the institutions they represent in these collection development efforts. Access to the Center's Africana holdings is also discussed. For researchers located at institutions that hold membership in CAMP or CRL, access and user policies are liberal. It is possible for a user at such an institution to acquire an extensive amount of material in a single interlibrary loan transaction and to have access to the material indefinitely or until needed by another researcher. Bibliographic access is provided by CRLCATALOG, the online catalog of the center, as well as through a variety of printed bibliographies, reference folders, collection inventories, and the center's web site. The forty-two institutions that currently hold membership in CAMP and their institutional representatives are listed on the Web at http://wwwcrl.uchicago.edu/info/campmem.htm .

Guides, Collections and Ancillary Materials to African Archival Resources in the United States

This is a list of published guides to the archives of Africa, especially those in microform and including inventories, records, catalogs, lists both finding- and special-, indexes, annual reports (and for South Africa, also archivalia and trials), arranged by regions, primary international language, and countries, excluding only Egypt, with titles in English, French, and Portuguese, but not those solely in Arabic. No titles were found for Spanish-speaking Africa. Collections of Africana on microfilm are identified as they provide better access to original materials not otherwise available. In addition, considerable time and funds have been spent by non-profit organizations such as the Cooperative Africana Microform Project (CAMP) in identifying archives and manuscripts to be filmed, targeting the funds to film them, and then having the microfilm available to scholars world-wide. The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) online catalog which contains CAMP's nearly 10,000 titles is a major source for African archival materials.