Report

 

Indo-US Workshop on

 

Open Digital Libraries and Interoperability

Holiday Inn at Ballston, Arlington, VA, USA

June 23-25, 2003

 

Funded by

INDO-U.S. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY FORUM

Fulbright House, 12 Hailey Road, New Delhi 110011 INDIA

(ref. Approval Order IUSSTF/WS/Q3- 35 Digital Library/2002, 5 May 2003)

and

Internet Technology Innovation Center (Virginia, USA)

 

Organized by

In USA: Virginia Tech and Old Dominion University

In India: Indian Institute of Science and University of Mysore

 

 

Co-Chairs

 

Edward A. Fox (fox@vt.edu)

Department of Computer Science

Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

660 McBryde Hall – Mailcode – 0106

Virginia Tech., Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA

 

N Balakrishnan

Division of Information Science

Super Computer Education Research Centre

Indian Institute of Science

BANGALORE 560 012 INDIA

 

Shalini Urs

Department of Library and Information Science

University of Mysore, Manasgangotri

Mysore-570 006, INDIA

 

Mohammad Zubair

Department of Computer Science

Old Dominion University

Norfolk, VA  23529

 

 

Draft Workshop Report

1. Vision
2. Mission
3. Expected Outcomes
4. The Meeting
5. Results and Tenor of the Meeting
6. Summary of papers and Presentations
7. Breakout Presentations
8. Recommendations

 “Books are my friends; Books are my teachers; Learning improves creativity; Creativity leads to knowledge; Knowledge empowers me; hence, books are our friends.”

 

Poem from Dr. Abdul Kalam, President of India in a telephone talk with the Coordinators of the Workshop

 

Draft Workshop Report

 

Vision

An Indo-US DL Forum, sustaining Indo-US collaboration on digital libraries, to:

• Promote understanding between the two countries;
• Work towards reducing the digital divide;
• Advance the practice, science and technology of digital libraries;
• Support various Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and Open Digital Library initiatives;
• Foster Collaborative Projects in the field of digital libraries.

 

Mission

To explore possibilities for collaboration in the development of digital library technology in India and US, expand the amount of full-text, multimedia, and metadata content, and pursue inter-continental joint research on digital libraries.

Expected outcomes

• Institutionalization of Indo-US collaboration in DL
• Reaching 100+ universities in India with some types of tools, e.g., for Digital Libraries (e.g., DL in a box), possibly a packaging of hardware and software for ease of coordination
• Software packages for taking India Language Content (both analog and born digital materials)
• Tools and technologies for setting up digital libraries in different formats
• Well trained manpower to develop and manage the DLs

 

The Meeting

Forty people representing different organizations and agencies from two countries met in Holiday Inn in Arlington, VA, outside Washington D.C during June 23-25, 2003 to explore collaboration between India and US related to the rapidly growing field of digital libraries. Participants included government officials from India and US responsible for programs in education, digital libraries, and other areas of research; researchers in the US and India in the area of digital libraries, digital infrastructure, and processing; and representatives of providers and consumers of digital library data. Their deliberations covered many dimensions, from content management to technology to policy. Key content areas considered included health/medical/bio-sciences, culture/history/language, and education. It was clear that   making very large numbers of computer across the two countries work together (“interoperate”), with reasonable performance, leveraging investments in networking and declining prices of storage, posed many technical challenges. The Meeting resolved to work towards addressing these challenges.

 

The Workshop Programme:

 

The Programme consisted of  -

• Keynote talks (3)
• Position papers (20)
• Breakout sessions (2 sessions in three groups)

 

Results and Tenor of the meeting

• The lively group of participants worked closely and yet openly over the three days of the workshop. The format of 15 minute presentations followed by 15 minutes of questions and discussion proved a fruitful format for engaging participants.
• Breakout groups, breaks, and meetings over meals also added to the synergy of the group. The result was a general agreement on a number of problems that should be addressed both immediately and in the long-run, and a number of suggestions for maintaining the momentum of the group through short-term plans that include deadlines for longer-term proposals.

 

Summary of Papers & Presentations

 

After the registration, Co-coordinators Edward Fox and Shalini Urs extended a warm welcome to the delegates. Ed Fox set the program moving by outlining the structure of the three day meeting and Shalini  Urs traced the milestones in Indo-US collaboration program as a backdrop to the Meeting. N Balakrishnan in his keynote address discussed the issues and  challenges of taking a million books to the Web.  Reducing the human overhead in obtaining information from Digital Library and general web resources, while retaining the valuable contents, was the problem addressed by Gio Wiederhold in his keynote talk on “Increasing the Information Density in Digital Library Results”. Stephen M Griffin and Zia Lee from NSF highlighted the digital library initiatives in USA in the third keynote talk.

 

During the workshop over 20 presentations were made. The deliberations took place on several key issues dealing with Open Archives Initiative (OAI), Web archives, Multi-lingual content, Protocols, Data Security, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), Metadata, Data mining, Networking, etc.

 

V. N. Rajasekharan Pillai, Vice Chairman, University Grants Commission, India gave an overview of the status of “digitization in Indian Universities”.

 

S. Ramani, who discussed technical aspects of the Indian Education System, in particular regarding network capabilities, attracted immense interest. He presented a paper on “Digital Libraries for Colleges”.

 

Jagadish Arora presented a paper on “INDEST Consortium: consortia-based subscription to electronic resources”, where the benefit of Consortia-based Subscription is also passed on to other educational institutions.

 

Sunder Singh touched upon issues like content for digitization, creation of digital resources and management of language resources, standards, technologies, skill development and IPR in his talk on “Digital Provide: an Indian experience”.

 

T.A.V. Murthy presented an over all picture of the problems arising out of dealing with multi-lingual issues associated with Indian modern languages while digitizing and using Unicode based metadata.

 

T.B. Rajashekar talked about improving the visibility of  Indian Research. He proposed that India evolve a network of distributed, interoperable institutional digital research repositories covering, to begin with, research output of academic institutions and public-supported research laboratories. 

 

Sadagopan  in his  presentation on “Libraries in Higher Education”  took stock of independent developments in digital library efforts, and challenges in their integration, particularly from a developing country perspective with limited access to computing resources. 

 

Sathyanarayana    presented an approach for libraries to develop local archiving models as an extension of their e-journal consortia. 

 

Shalini Urs presented the complexities and intricacies of Indian languages and scripts, the enormous advantages of the XML-Unicode environment and the Vidyanidhi approach and their experiment in successfully taking Indian language theses to the Web.

 

Speakers focusing particularly on DL projects and research included Dave Fulker, author of a paper on enhancing Science Education through a Partnership of Digital Libraries, in which he explained the NSDL vision. He identified  four facets of advancement and the challenges for that.

 

Martin Halbert explained the OCKHAM initiative - a working group   sponsored by the Digital Library Federation to investigate digital library architectural approaches that might foster greater interoperability and affordability of such infrastructure.

 

 Thomas B. Hickey presented “Web Services for Digital Library Construction using Standard Protocols”. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is an international consortium focused on furthering the interoperability of digital libraries (DLs) through the use of "metadata harvesting". 

 

Michael L. Nelson presented U. S. Government use of the OAI. 

 

The OpenURL Framework is about the delivery of highly targeted information services in an intuitive way.  Regarding this general mission, Eric F. Van de Velde invited everyone to think imaginatively about new ways of putting this tool to work.

 

Mohammad Zubair presented Kepler and related tools that can be used for building communal digital libraries, building upon personal collections supported by client-side tools.

 

The importance of metadata in digital libraries underlies the development of schemas such as Dublin Core and frameworks for interoperability such as RDF; this was addressed by Padmini Srinivasan.

 

Stephen Helmreich focused on those tools, resources, and areas of research that might be of value for developing and enhancing the value of digital libraries, and particularly those that might be of value in Indo-US collaboration.

 

Culture and “Cyber infrastructure: the need for a cultural informatics” was the topic of the talk given by Gregory Crane. He focused on the problem of cultural communication: understanding cultures, our own and those of others very different from us, and communicating our understanding both of ourselves and of others to the rest of the world.

 

Bob Allen presented paper on “Event gazetteers and timelines for history and cultural access”. He explained how special tools could help us manage available information such as from collections of newspapers, turning them into usable digital libraries.

 

Ching-chih Chen presented the potential of Global Memory Net, in that  her NSF/International Digital Library Project, has expanded the original Chinese Memory Net to include invaluable cultual and heritage resources of countries around the world.  She hopes that Indian Memory Net can be a part of the global digital network

Breakout Session Presentations

There were two sets of breakout sessions, with three groups discussing the same general issues, and then reporting in plenary for group discussion. All breakout sessions were asked to develop recommendations in three areas: content, technology, and policy. The first breakout session focused on putting forward a research agenda. The second breakout session focused on putting forward an action plan: moving these recommendations to proposals involving funding sources, collaboration, sustainability, and plans for future work.

Recommendations

The following are the key recommendations of the Workshop:

A. Follow on Workshop

1.       The Workshop was an important land mark in fostering and promoting US- India collaboration in the area of digital libraries.

2.       In order to realize the full significance of the progress made at this Workshop and to build on the interest & the momentum generated, it is strongly recommended that a follow on Indo-US Workshop be held in India sometime in 2004.

3.       Consideration should be given to solicit support from institutions such as the NSF, Ford Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other organizations in the USA for funding the US part of the expenses for the forthcoming Workshop and/or other future collaborative activities.

4.       The following organizations/institutions could be approached for funding the Indian part of the expenses and the organization of the Workshop and/or other future collaborative activities:

o           Indo-US Science and Technology Forum

o           DST to support the same if requests are made jointly to NSF- DST

o           Department of Culture

o           MHRD

o           UGC/INFLIBNET

o           DBT/MIT

o           Department of IT and BT, Government of Karnataka

o           and others.

 

B. Major areas of Collaboration

·                               Languages/culture/history

·                               Education

·                               Bio/medical/health

·                               Performance/networking/storage

 

C. People

Makeup of the coordinating group – – stakeholders

·             Researchers

·             Funding agencies / sponsors – representatives

·             DL practitioners

·             Government and other policy level representatives

·             Industry

·             Users (scientists, teachers)

D. Content and Collection Development

·                               Analog/Print Resources

• To reach a critical mass, certain measures such as the following are to be taken up:
• Identification of  collections
• Oriental Research Institutes
• Old collections in private libraries
• Historical records and books
• Newspaper archives (especially regional and local)
• It may be possible to persuade publishers to transfer copyrights of out of print collections, which are still under copyright restriction.
• To commission developing content/collections targeted at specific groups (Ex: Text books for different levels and disciplines)

·                               Born digital materials

• Identify available free materials
• Establish an Indian equivalent to ERIC, responsible for collection development and metadata
• Focus also on Indian content and to providing visibility for the same
• Country specific and domain specific/genre specific content creation:

·             Theses / Dissertations

·             Culture-specific literature

·             Flora/fauna (with connections to genomics)

·             Biodiversity

·             Geo-based: water flow, weather

·             Enhanced open source collections in other areas, as available

 

E. Content /Collection Management

• Promote sharing of metadata for mutual benefit and use
• Recommend the use of OAI for harvesting of metadata from library catalogues
• An Indian Union catalog- develop an Indian OCLC kind of institution for the union catalogue or identify an existing institution to do the same

F. Services

• National DOI registration agency in India
• Centralized cataloguing agency (e.g., OCLC-India)
• Mirroring of Indian resources
• National Open URL resolver
• Setting up Computers in a box (with software and content) at Universities and other centres
• Collaborative development of DL software

G. Education and training

• In India, in the next 3 years at least 10% of library and information professionals should be trained to achieve competency in digital library development.
• Develop advanced modular curriculum
• Agencies such as UGC/CSIR and others to provide fellowships in Digital Libraries
• Organise workshops in different regions of India
• Given the interdisciplinary nature of the field, training also should be interdisciplinary.
• Identify centres of excellence/competence for imparting education and training in India and the US and promote linkages between the them
• To enable collaboration, fund the visits/sabbaticals/ exchanges between two countries through programmes such as Fulbright
• Work towards introduction of digital libraries as a formal course in various computer science departments / schools / institutions in India

H. Research

The workshop identified the following areas of research:

• Identification and mapping of the pattern of Indo-US collaborations through a variety of datasets such as bibliometric methods, proxy and ISP logs
• Language related issues: OCR for Indian Languages, encoding and other technologies and tools for handling Indian Language content
• Developing resources for cross language retrieval such as ontologies
• Performance related issues such as optimization regarding access and inter continental data sharing
• Archiving of online materials
• IPR and Digital Rights Management issues

I. Infrastructure development

• Explore the possibility of  high speed connectivity between India and  the US

J. Funding – possible sources:

• Government of India, State Governments (DST, MHRD-UGC,  DAE, Department of Culture, DBT, DSIR, MIT and others)
• Private Foundations- Ford, Mellon, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others
• NSF and other agencies
• Industry

 

K. Plan of Action

·                               Publicizing the workshop report by putting it on WWW

·                               Opening participation in collaboration

·                               Establishing a coordinating group

·                               Forming teams for preparing collaborative project proposals

·                               Organizing the next workshop

·                               Work towards institutionalizing Indo-US collaboration

L. Key Topics for Future Discussion

• Identify specific examples of potential benefits
• Unique document collections where there is some risk if no preservation effort occurs
• Unique objects where multimedia representations are required
• When the DL could really only be developed in India
• When a test bed in India would be just the right choice to test some ideas/approaches
• Geo-based information
• Linguistic studies that can benefit from 400 languages
• General models for OCR that if demonstrated with scripts in India will be helpful elsewhere

 

M. Coordinating groups – Goals:

• Formal Structure for Indo-US DL Forum
• Formation of Indo-US DL Forum Coordination Group in both countries