| Chair: | Leo Waaijers |
| Participants: | David C Prosser, Director SPARC Europe |
| Michael Mabe, Associate director, Elsevier Science |
The panel debate will focus on a comparison between the classical Subscription
Model (where the reader - i.e. his library - pays afterwards for publication
of an article) and the upcoming Open Access Model (where the author - i.e. his
institute or project - pays upfront for publication) under ceteris paribus conditions.
I.e. in both cases only fully edited and refereed articles that are published
in a journal that is eligible to ISI's 'impact factory' will be considered.
What then, if any, are the differences between the two models for the author,
the reader, the publisher and the institute/library?
Three panel members will have five minutes each to present some aspects or viewpoints
that they deem crucial in the respective models and then the debate with the
audience fires away. In the end we will try to reach some conclusions.
| Chair: | Stefan Gradmann |
| Participants: | Dieter Fellner, Braunschweig University |
| Jela Steinerova, Bratislava University | |
| Vittore Casarosa, CNR Pisa/DELOS | |
| Daniel E. Atkins, University of Michigan |
The most important element in this panel's title are the question marks: the overall aim is to question the scope and nature of what is designated using the term 'Digital Library'. One could indeed state that the 'Digital Library' metaphor, although it may have been useful in a transitional period, gets increasingly inappropriate and an obstacle for shaping and understanding new architectures of collective information organisations. The opposite position would be to consider 'Digital Libraries' tangible, real entities of our present world (or at least of future worlds to come).
The basic question thus is, how 'digital' libraries will ever be.
The positions relating to this first dichotomy are likely to generate very different answers to a second one, this time regarding the relation between Digital Libraries Research & Development on the one hand and operational libraries. It can in fact be maintained that digital library R&D has been so self absorbed and academic that it has had virtually no impact on operational libraries or, on the contrary, that operational libraries, and the industry supporting them, have not had the imagination to exploit the results of digital library R&D, or that it is just the use of a misleading metaphor that suggests a relation between two sectors that have very little in common – much less anyway than is suggested by the 'Digital Library' metaphor.
| Chair: | Seamus Ross |
| Participants: | Michael Day, Research Officer (Metadata), UKOLN (UK) |
| Steve Knight, Digital Library Transition Co-ordinator, National Library of New Zealand (NZ) | |
| Catherine Owen, Executive Director, Performing Arts Data Service (PADS), Glasgow (UK) |
It is widely argued that metadata lie at the heart of activities to preserve
digital objects. They provide information about the behaviour, content, context
(e.g. provenance), and structure of digital objects. They are essential to any
digital library that wishes to ensure that its holdings can be found, retrieved,
understood, managed, secured, rendered, and made interoperable. Overtime they
play an increasingly central role in enabling users to verify the authenticity,
integrity, and reliability of the digital objects themselves. Without metadata
digital repositories can not be delivered that enable pervasive, interoperable,
and viable digital libraries. There are though too many metadata models, too
little evidence that creating metadata actually improves the longevity and usefulness
of digital objects, and little comparative evidence relating benefits to costs.
The Panel of preservation and metadata specialists, each of whom has already
made a contribution to our thinking about these issues, will discuss the future
trends in metadata creation (e.g. automating processes) and management, the
role metadata actually play in the ‘preservation viability’ of digital objects,
what predictive models might help us to determine the suitablity of classes
of metadata for enabling preservation, and whether the costs involved in creating
metadata will be offset by benefits in terms of increased preservability of
the digital objects acquired by digital libraries.