DS Meetings at the Beinecke, 24-26 February 2019
In February 2019, Digital Scriptorium held 2.5 days of meetings from Sunday February 24 through Tuesday February 26 at the Beinecke Library of Yale University. The meetings were hosted by E.C. Schroeder, Head of the Beinecke Library and Treasurer of Digital Scriptorium. The meetings included a meeting on Sunday afternoon of the DS Board of Directors, followed by two days of planning meetings that included the DS Board, the DS Advisory Council, invited speakers and other invited participants, including specialists with experience in online catalogs, data management, web portals, and digital technologies. For the planning meeting there were a total of about 25 people in attendance, although this varied depending on the participants’ schedules.
The Board meeting on Sunday 24 February focused on four topics: 1) the imminent planning meeting, 2) the Board and Annual meetings to be held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, 26-27 September 2019, 3) finances and charitable donations, and 4) a succession plan for Board leadership. Attending were Debra Cashion (Saint Louis University), President; Janine Pollock (The Free Library of Philadelphia), Vice President; E.C. Schroeder (Yale), Treasurer; Lynn Ransom (Penn), Secretary; David Faulds (Berkeley), Director-at-large; Vanessa Wilkie (Huntington Library), Director-at-large; and Lynne Grigsby (Berkeley), Technical Host; Cherry Williams (UC Riverside), Director-at-large (absent). The DS Board would especially like to call attention to the new Paypal Donation button included on the Home and Finance pages of the DS website. Paypal enables easy online donations by credit card, although DS gratefully accepts other forms of payment including checks. DS applies all of its membership fees to its technical host and thus depends on donations for any other expenses. Please consider giving DS your support.
The Board meeting was followed by a two-day planning meeting to address challenges to the technical future of the DS, or DS 2.0. The DS online union catalog includes unstructured legacy data, for example, contributed from various member institutions for over 20 years. The DS database, moreover, was originally built with software that no longer responds to catalogers’ or users’ needs. These issues and others were addressed at the planning meeting though presentations, group discussions, and team-work sessions.
The first day of the planning meeting included presentations to the group by eight invited speakers. Each presentation addressed various issues concerning relevant digital manuscript projects and the obstacles they have faced. The second day of the meeting included group discussions and team problem-solving. Participants from both days included the DS Board of Directors, members of the DS Advisory Council, and invited guests from the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, the Ohio State University (OSU), Tufts University, Saint Louis University (SLU), Harvard University, Columbia University, Fribourg University, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the Medieval Academy of America (MAA), the Huntington Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale University.
Although the problems addressed were daunting, the group experience was lively and energized, and everyone contributed lots of information, ideas, and options. No decisions about the future of DS were made, but it was not the intention of the meeting to arrive at decisions. Instead the meeting was held to benefit from the knowledge of experts to consider various strategies for digital manuscript catalogs in order to enrich the decision-making process going forward. Next steps will be to develop a conceptual model for a new online resource, a road map and timeline for rebuilding it, and an application for grant funding. The DS Board is grateful to all of the participants in the DS 2.0 planning meeting, and to the Beinecke Library of Yale University for the support it provided to make the meeting possible.
The list of participants follows:
Michael Appleby (Yale)
Chris Barbour (Tufts)
Debra Cashion (SLU)
Ray Clemens (Yale)
Mark Custer (Yale)
Lisa Fagin Davis (MAA)
Willliam Duba (Fribourg)
Diane Ducharme (Yale)
Consuelo Dutschke (Columbia)
Doug Emery (Penn)
David Faulds (UCB)
Lynne Grigsby (UCB)
Dan Gullo (HMML)
Rebecca Hirsch (Yale)
Eric Johnson (OSU)
Christopher Platts (Yale)
Janine Pollock (FLP)
Lynn Ransom (Penn)
E.C. Schroeder (Yale)
Rashmi Singhal (Harvard)
Bill Stoneman (Harvard)
Dominique Stutzman (CNRS, Paris)
Vanessa Wilkie (Huntington)