For New Yorkers: Report on the Meeting of the Regents Advisory Council on Libraries, Jan. 28

The Regents Advisory Council on Libraries met by phone on Jan. 28 for a short meeting.  This meeting was held days before the governor released his 2011-2012 budget, and indications were that the budget was going to contain bad news (and it did).  


During the conference call, we received a brief update from Deputy Commissioner Jeffrey Cannell on other legislative news, the December 2010 Regents Cultural Education Meeting, and the budget's effect on the State Library.   

John Hammond reported on the 2020 Vision process action plan and next steps.  Work on this began at the NYLA Annual Conference and will continue this year with other library partners.  The group wants to gather ample input from others and discussed how that might happen.  A session on this 2020 Vision is already scheduled for the NYLA 2011 Annual Conference.

The 2020 Vision grew out of our meeting with the Regents Cultural Education Committee last year, and so our report to them this year include an update on that effort.

We did discuss other topics, including the need for school librarians and work that is being done on literacy standards.   John Monahan and Sara Kelly Johns led those discussions.

Advisory Council members go to the Albany in February to meet with legislators and we discussed that activity.  Since Jan. 28, we have learned that the date we'd selected is not a date when legislators will be in Albany (day after President's Day), so we're discussing alternatives. 

For New Yorkers: Governor's proposed 2011-2012 budget

On Feb. 1, Governor Andrew Cuomo released his budget proposal for 2011-2012.  In the proposal, he has the following cuts to libraries and schools:

• 10% reduction in Library Aid from $83 million to $76 million
• $1.5 billion reduction in School Aid
• 10% or $3.9 million reduction in Bundy Aid to private colleges
• $115 million cut to SUNY
• $70 million cut to CUNY

 While a news report today talked about library funding over the last four years, it is important to note that state funding for libraries is currently at 1998 levels. 


A local school administrator sees these cuts as a way of forcing school districts to cooperate and consolidate.  We may see that occur with some libraries.

{What follows is totally my point of view...}

Libraries always focus on service to their users/patrons/members and in keeping that service intact.  We don't want our users to suffer because of our budget woes, so we "make do" with less.  For some, that may prove that libraries don't need as much funding as they receive.  Maybe it is time to visibly do less with less -- e.g., fewer hours and services, less space, etc. -- and let legislators hear about the pain that is causes. 

{End of my point of view}

NYLA's Library Advocacy Day is March 1 and likely 1000+ library staff members and supports will descend on Albany.  If you cannot go, there are a number of advocacy tools on the NYLA web site as well as links to contact information for state legislators.

Virage MediaBin

Last spring, someone told me that they had selected MediaBin as their digital asset management system.  I was going to write a blog post at the time about MediaBin after I learned more about it, but didn't.  From what I did learn, this is a product that would be used in specific situations.  The web site says:

Virage MediaBin centralizes the management of logos, copy, video, images, presentations, and other rich media and digital assets and makes them accessible to geographically dispersed teams. Virage MediaBin is the only commercial digital asset management system designed to work with "original" master assets: it dynamically generates variations or derivatives and delivers them on request. Virage MediaBin uses a patented high-volume media processing engine to render on-demand transformations quickly.

There are likely other products on the market that do similar things.  You should be able to find other products by searching the literature for MediaBin and then seeing who else is mentioned.

Addendum (2/3/2011):  Be sure to read the comment below from Ralph Windsor, who notes that there are other companies that produce similar software and that this software isn't the "only".   He suggests looking at the web site http://www.opensourcedigitalassetmanagement.org/ for information on open source DAM  programs.

Every company tried to position their product as the best solution or the only one that can meet your needs.  Keep in mind that every company has competition.  In fact, for a company to be successful, it needs competition.  Competition proves a need in the marketplace.  At any rate, I do tend to ignore platitudes in company press releases, but forget that others do not. 

The Vatican's Apostolic Library

In January, the New Yorker magazine published an article entitled " GOD'S LIBRARIANS: Letter from Rome" (length abstract).  If you have a subscription to the New Yorker (online or hardcopy), you can view the entire article.  Given that most people can't see that article, here are linked to related content about the work that the Vatican did.  Note that digitization is not specifically discussed, but the work was done to increase access to the materials as well as keep the materials safe.

• Vatican to Open High-Tech Library for Ancient Volumes
•  Sounds of silence: Restored Vatican Library ready for scholarly hush

And then there is this, which does not seem to be a part of the Vatican Library, but it a digitization effort:

• Vatican digitizes more than 7 million photos from archives

I do know that one of the Vatican's libraries did a digitization program in the 1990s and reportedly created hardcopy surrogates to place on the shelf.  So the Vatican is indeed using technology to preserve its past and ensure access into the future.

Report : The Survey of Library & Museum Digitization Projects 2011 Edition

This report is available for purchase, but even the press release (below) contains interesting informarion.

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The nearly 200 page report looks closely at how academic, public and special libraries and museums are digitizing special and other collections. The study is based on detailed data on costs, equipment use, staffing, cataloging, marketing, licensing revenue and other facets of digitization projects from nearly 100 libraries and museums in the United States, the UK, continental Europe, Canada, and Australia.

The study covers and presents data separately for digitizers of photographs, film and video, music and audio, text and re-digitization of existing digital mediums. Data is also broken out by budget size, region of the world, type of institution and other factors. Data presented separately for academic libraries, public and government libraries, special libraries and museums.

For more information please click on:
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/product/26199f/the_survey_of_library_museum_digitization_p

Just a few of the study's many findings are that:

-Digitization budgets come largely through non-budgetary allocations. The library or museum annual budget accounted for only a little over 35% of the overall digitization budget.

-Prospects for digitization funding in the United States were much better than prospects outside of the USA; about 28.6% of US survey participants considered the outlook pretty good or excellent while only 5.88% of those from other countries shared this optimism.

-The mean annual number of staff hours expended per institution on digitization projects was 2,272 with a range of 0 to 24,000 (or about 12-13 full time employees spending all of their time on digitization projects).

-Only 3.45% of institutions sampled have outsourced rights, permissions or copyright management to any third party.

-Overall survey participants say that over the past three years they have outsourced close to 27% of their overall digitization work.

-Close to 54% of the organizations sampled have some form of digital asset management software and an additional 8.3% share a system with another department or division of their institution.

-14.61% used the servers of some kind of third party service; this was most popular in the USA, where one sixth of respondents used a third party server service for digital content storage

-16.05% of organizations surveyed license or rent any aspect of their digital collection to any party

-Digitizers whose primary medium was music and audio spent 56.25% of their total digitization staff time on cataloging and metadata related issues

For more information please click on:
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/product/26199f/the_survey_of_library_museum_digitization_p