Following our well-publicized and well-received October announcements, we have been working to put in place operational processes for the OCA. We have also put in place initiatives through which we will coordinate the initial collections and services, as well as the policies, practices, standards and implementation guidelines that will enable their further development and use.
Our focus has been on the OCA's first year. A key milestone will be a public event we are planning for October 2006 to demonstrate the power of collaborative and open efforts to build joint collections. That focus informs the agenda for the coming year.
The OCA will initially concentrate on digitally reformatted monographs and serials which represent diverse times, regions and subjects which are in the public domain or available under a Creative Commons license. In other words, the OCA is initially interested in the broad range of digitized documents that are in our libraries and archives.
For an October 2006 event, we would like to focus on materials that reflect the history, people, culture, and ecology of North America. This decision is in part a practical one. It establishes essential priorities for the OCA while emphasizing collection depth as a means of encouraging the development of value-added services. It also reflects the general orientation of the initial collections that have been offered to the OCA (at this stage, OCA is not harvesting metadata).
The core functions of the OCA will be provided through working groups which advise on key operational issues and help establish essential policies and practices. Details about the first working groups are set out below. These groups are designed to be work-oriented and independent so that we can get substantial collections built quickly. We are eager for your input into these activities, so please contact the person responsible for the working group(s) in which you are interested. If you think there should be other groups, and especially ones you would be interested in working on, please let us know.
The Internet Archive is continuing its role in administering the Open Content Alliance (OCA), but Rick Prelinger, interim OCA director, will unfortunately follow through with his plan to return to the world of moving images. He will help with recruiting OCA staff, and any suggestions for a great Executive Director would be most welcome.
Charter: Working with libraries and other content providers, the group will recommend and help evaluate approaches to describe digitized materials that will be contributed, to keep track of what is digitized, and to help inform choices about what should be digitized (including copyright status). The group will propose and develop approaches to guide selection and scanning efforts. It will also develop cost-efficient services to enable coordinated approaches to the highly distributed development of OCA's collections.
Charter: Recommend minimum requirements necessary to engender community-wide trust in the OCA collections as persistent, cultural, digital resources. It is anticipated that a basic statement of minimum requirements will leverage extensive work already conducted by a variety of library, archive, and scholarly organizations and accordingly result from a one-time meeting of key stakeholders (followed of course by a period of public review and comment).
Chair: Dan Greenstein (University of California - California Digital Library) (Daniel.Greenstein AT ucop.edu)
RLG program officer support: Robin Dale (robin.dale AT rlg.org)
Charter: Solicit contributions of digital materials, facilities, tools, and financial support from organizations under Open Content Alliance principles. This group will evaluate and prioritize contributions offered to the OCA as well as expand and interpret the OCA principles. This group will also be in charge of officially recognizing contributions that it feels warrant recognition. Recognition can be noted on the OpenContentAlliance.org website, letters of support, press releases, and the like.
Chair: Rick Prelinger (OCA/Internet Archive)
Charter: Recommend formats for digital books to be stored in a filesystem. Leveraging work done on other scanning projects, this committee will recommend a few formats that can be used by scanning projects or those contributing books to the OCA.
Chair: Stu Blair (Internet Archive)
Charter: Produce a document that describes in detail the workflow and costs involved for libraries and others interested in scanning printed materials maintained in their collections.
Chair: Robin Chandler (University of California - California Digital Library) (robin.chandler AT ucop.edu)
Charter: Produce a document that describes the protocol (including minimum standards) involved in transferring digitally reformatting data to the IA for inclusion in the OCA collection.
Chair: Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive)
Staff support from University of California - California Digital Library
Thank you for all the help, and if you have any suggestions at a meta-level, please write to Rick Prelinger (rick AT archive.org) or Brewster Kahle (brewster AT archive.org) so we can have a productive 2006.
-Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger