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RLG Cultural Materials Alliance & Beyond

Explore the evolution, achievements, and closure of RLG Cultural Materials Alliance. Discover future plans for RLG Programs and OCLC's digital services agenda.

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RLG Cultural Materials Alliance & Beyond

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  1. RLG Cultural Materials Alliance and Beyond Ricky Erway OCLC Programs and Research Meeting of the Cultural Materials Alliance Jan 21, 2007

  2. Evolution of the service • Began planning in 1999 • RLG members, board, and staff • Technology advisors • Formed Alliance in 2000 • Advisory groups • Policy • Content • Description • Surrogates • Interface • Instructional technology • Primary, Content, and Technical Contacts at Alliance institutions • CM-forum • Various Alliance meetings • Released RLG Cultural Materials service in 2002

  3. A reminder…

  4. Trove.net • Initial intention, after serving the academic community: • Reach new audiences • Gain experience in licensing use of images • Investigate new revenue potential • Planning with policy advisory group in 2002 • Launched Trove.net in 2004 • Partnership with IndexStock Imagery • Partnership with LookSmart in 2004 • Engaged consultants for various investigations of other opportunities

  5. Summary to Date • 54 Alliance institutions • 36 contributors • 117 collections • 250,000 works • ¾ million digital objects • About 50 institutions subscribed

  6. Accomplishments • An international Alliance • Agreements for collaboration • Acceptable terms of use • Descriptive Metadata Guidelines • Preparing Digital Surrogates Guidelines • Report on the use of images in the classroom • Innovative interface for enhanced discovery of cultural documents • Public/private collaboration on image licensing • Greater exposure of members’ special collections via the open web • Collaborative experience for participants

  7. Sober Assessment • Digitization motivated primarily by local factors • Not much content that wasn’t already freely available • Modest subscriber base with little prospect for growth – and disappointing use at institutions that did subscribe • Users were looking somewhere else • Partnerships with commercial interests did not bear expected fruit

  8. Decision to end RLG Cultural Materials • High cost to maintain • Low revenue • Maturation of digitization initiatives • New framework for similar activity

  9. What next? • RLG Programs will continue to investigate topics of interest to our partners • Mass digitization • Large-scale digitization of special collections • Registries to coordinate digitization activities • Investigations on the impact of digitized content on scholarly methods • OCLC has an ambitious digital services agenda

  10. Contact info • Ricky Erway • Program officer, RLG Programs • OCLC Programs and Research • (650) 691-2228 • erwayr@oclc.org • Greg Zick • Vice President, Digital Collection Services • OCLC Digital Content Management Services • (206) 281-1632 • zickg@oclc.org

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