About the presenters:

Liz Bishoff
Project Director
Colorado Digitization Project

Liz Bishoff is currently the Project Director of the Colorado Digitization Project. The project, a collaborative among Colorado's libraries, museums, archives and historical societies, is developing a virtual collection of Colorado's unique resources and special collections. The project, funded by IMLS, the Colorado State Library and the Colorado Regional Library Systems has awarded $180,000 in grants to 40 institutions involved in 30 projects. The projects are creating digital images on a range of topics from the University of Colorado Boulders historic sheet music collection to the National Mining Museum and Hall of Fame historic photograph collection, to the Boulder History Museum's historic costume collection. A total of 50,000 images will be created. To provide enhanced access to these resources, the CDP is developing a union catalog of metadata using a variety of metadata formats. The project has developed standards and guidelines for metadata and scanning, a website that brings together approximately 40 existing digitization projects, and a training program for participants. All is accessible via the website http://coloradodigital.coallliance.org.

Liz is the owner of The Bishoff Group, a management consulting organization specializing in library and library related organizations.

Prior to her current position, Liz was Vice President, Member Services at OCLC. Her responsibilities include management of OCLC relationships with external organizations, including the national libraries, professional library-related organizations and government relations, OCLC Users Council, and Library Member Relations. Liz was actively involved in many national cooperative cataloging programs, including CONSER and was a founding members of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Prior to this position, Liz was Director of the Online Union Catalog Product Management Division, which included strategic planning and product management for OCLC PRISM Cataloging, Interlibrary Loan, and Union List systems.

Liz is the immediate past-President of the American Library Association, Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. She is currently the ALA Treasurer and a member of ALA Board. Liz has more than 30 years of work in the cataloging, including membership on the Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee, a member of the ALCTS Subject Analysis Committee, and a member of the Catalog Code Revision Committee. In addition to her involvement in ALCTS, she has also held committee appointments in the Public Library Association and the LAMA.

Liz has extensive experience in public libraries. She was the principal librarian for Support Services at Pasadena (California) Public Library, with responsibility for management of the technical services, circulation and automated services. Liz has been a public library director, school media specialist, and cataloger in her 30 year library career. She has taught in the graduate library programs at Rosary College and Emporia.

Liz holds an MLS from Rosary College, and has post-graduate work in public administration at Roosevelt University.

Bill received his MLS from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in 1979 and has been involved in cataloging or cataloging related activities for his entire career. He is currently Head of Cataloging at the University of Colorado at Boulder and has previously held positions at Stanford University and Northwestern University.

He has been active in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) serving on the Standing Committee on Standards and on the BIBCO Operations Committee. In addition, he serves as a trainer for the PCC for both NACO and BIBCO. He has conducted NACO training at the National Library of New Zealand, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of New Mexico, the Nevada State Library, Trinity University (San Antonio), the University of Wyoming, and the University of Kansas. His BIBCO training includes the University of Oregon, Texas A&M University, the University of New Mexico, and Oklahoma State University.

Bill has also been active in ALA/ALCTS and is currently the Chair of the ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Section. Previously he has served on the ALCTS Membership Committee, the ALCTS Fundraising Committee, the ALCTS Leadership Development Committee, ALCTS/CCS Subject Analysis Committee, and ALCTS/CCS Policy and Research Committee. He has also given many papers at ALA conferences and has published in various professional journals.

In Colorado, Bill served as Chair of the Cataloging and Reference Task Force that designed and implemented Prospector, a union catalog for 16 institutions in Colorado, and has worked on the Metadata Working Group of the Colorado Digitization Project (CDP) since the CDP's inception. He has taught metadata workshops for the CDP and worked on the standards devised by the CDP for project participants. In addition, he has served as a web-mentor for students at Dominican University.

Summary:

The Colorado Digitization Project, a collaborative of Colorado's archives, historical societies, libraries and museums has undertaken an initiative to increase user access to the special collections and unique resources held by these institutions via digitization and distribution via the Internet. When exploring the holdings of these nearly 350 institutions, we find that there is significant overlap in holdings, not overlap of individual items, but content overlap. The goal of the CDP is to find ways to bring together the resources held by widely dispersed cultural heritage institutions into one virtual collection. The CDP website will provide one stop shopping for the residents of Colorado and beyond.

Over the last 24 months, the project has had to address a range of issues to realize our goal of increased access. Many of these issues have emerged as a result of the multi-cultural heritage institution types participating in the project, including the lack of a common mission or vision, different audience expectations, insufficient knowledge base on the range of issues related to digitization, the lack of a common set of metadata standards, both for the descriptive components and the subject analysis, urgent need by users to locate this widely distributed content, barriers presented by current web searching, and unfamiliarity working across cultural heritage institution types.

Through the first year (1998-1999) the project began by building the collaborative, exposing participants to the different needs and issues of the partner organizations. All agreed that to realize the goals of the project, standards, particularly metadata standards had to move to the top of the list. Second, there was the recognition that we couldn't mandate a single metadata standard, as many of the institutions had systems in place to support their internal metadata needs. Third we realized that it would be years before the web searching would be sophisticated enough to retrieve the level of information from a decentralized set of images.

Our first decision was to develop a union catalog of metadata, as a near term solution to the information identification issues. To support that union catalog, and accommodate local preferences, we developed a set of metadata guidelines (descriptive, functional and administrative) that doesn't require the adoption of one standard, such as MARC or EAD or DC. Rather we established a set of core elements derived from the Dublin Core elements, which when loaded into the OCLC SiteSearch software would support cross database searching.