II. HISTORY

A. VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia

VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, consists of the libraries of the thirty-nine state-assisted colleges and universities within the Commonwealth of Virginia, including: the six doctoral institutions, the nine four-year comprehensive colleges and universities, and the twenty-four community and two-year branch colleges. In addition, the consortium includes twenty-nine independent, private, not-for-profit institutions that participate as full members where possible. The Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society participate as associate members. VIVA schools (both public and independent) represent a fulltime equivalent enrollment of over 265,700 students.

VIVA's mission is to provide, in an equitable, cooperative and cost-effective manner, enhanced access to library and information resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia's research libraries serving the higher education community. It seeks to fulfill this mission by assisting the Commonwealth's institutions of higher education to enhance learning by improving faculty and staff productivity, by avoiding unnecessary duplication of critical intellectual resources, by adding value to library collections, and by leveraging digital and other technologies to transform the delivery of information.

VIVA is not a part of any one institution, but is an organization in which the stakeholders are from every area of the state. It does not have a central bureaucracy. Rather, it is a distributed effort managed by representatives of doctoral, comprehensive and community college libraries in which all institutions contribute. Much of the work of VIVA is accomplished by the six standing committees which are composed entirely of volunteers from throughout the state. The VIVA Special Collections Committee was one of the original standing committees and since 1994 has laid the ground work for statewide cooperation. The goal of the VIVA Special Collections Committee is to support and enhance the efforts of each public academic library in the Commonwealth and the state library to make their unique Virginia resources available online.

The Virginia General Assembly has recognized the importance of VIVA's contributions to higher education through its continued financial support, including a total of nearly $6 million in the state budget for 1999-2000 biennium. In addition, individual institutions have supported VIVA in a variety of ways, most notably through the significant amounts of time donated by dedicated library staff members throughout the Commonwealth.

Since its inception in 1994, VIVA's contributions have been significant. They include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Improved service to the academic community by adding resources exceeding 32,000 new titles (indices, reference sources, full-text of journals). The result has been the delivery of a wide range of carefully selected resources to every student enrolled in a Virginia public institution whether at a community, comprehensive or doctoral college or university. The added value is estimated to be $5.4 million of new resources, which are available for the first time ever at many Virginia colleges and universities.

2. Substantially increased the buying power of Virginia's academic libraries (public and private) by negotiations with vendors of electronic sources for group purchases. The cumulative value added financial benefit from VIVA's inception in 1994 through 1997 is $17,624,428, savings which would not have been available through individual library purchases.

3. Integrated VIVA resources into the curriculum. Many VIVA member libraries have included VIVA resources on their websites. Increasingly faculty and librarians working together have incorporated these sources into the research courses of the disciplines as well as introductory course sequences for entering students.

4. Increased resource sharing among VIVA libraries. A 20% increase in this past year in interlibrary loans among VIVA member libraries is testimony to the success of this effort. Because of the technology available through VIVA and a restructuring of library staff, users of VIVA libraries enjoy a delivery of materials through interlibrary loan that is one-third faster than the national average. Large numbers of requests are now filled within 48 hours.

5. Established internationally recognized guidelines for cataloging electronic resources (URL: http://viva.lib.virginia.edu/~js7y/vivacat/guidelines.html) and developed cataloging expertise at many institutions across the state. Catalogers in Virginia are leading the nation in consortial activities.

6. Upgraded the skills and knowledge of librarians, faculty and staff. Because VIVA resources are digital, their delivery requires a high level of technical expertise. VIVA funding for training has contributed to this effort, including support for three EAD training workshops by Daniel Pitti sponsored by the VIVA Special Collections Committee.

7. Developed cooperation, teamwork and collaboration among librarians and staff of both private and public academic libraries that has been extraordinarily rare in a statewide effort.

B. Development of VIVA's Virginia Heritage Project.

The VIVA Special Collections Committee began work on the Virginia Heritage Project in the summer of 1998. During the late summer, the Committee conducted an initial survey (see Appendix K, VIVA Special Collections Committee Survey) of the archival collections held in the special collections of the public four-year colleges and universities. This survey solicited information on subject areas covered, finding aids, time period of the collections, equipment available, and institutional progress on digitization. The initial survey was extended to include the independent members of VIVA during the winter of 1999.

The results of the first round of the initial survey (see Appendix L, Survey Results) were distributed to members of the Special Collections Committee at their meeting on September 23, 1998. Given the overwhelming amount of available material held by the participating institutions, the VIVA Special Collections Committee decided to select a unifying theme for the development of the union database from one of the categories central to most of the collections: African-American studies, the arts, literature, music, or the Civil War. After extensive discussion, the Committee decided to pursue the theme of African-American history and culture, because of the great extent of material available in the VIVA member libraries, its national impact, and the fact that this theme could readily include appropriate material from the other major categories, such as the arts, literature, and the Civil War. The Committee also decided to conduct a second survey specifically on African-American resources to be included in this project, focusing initially on those collections included in Michael Plunkett's Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts.

The Committee decided that highest priority should be given to converting to EAD the great number of existing finding aids (more than 1,000 and most existing only in typewritten form), and to providing worldwide access to them over the Internet via a union database. The recent release of version 1.0 of the EAD Document Type Definition (DTD), the relative lack of experience in using EAD at the academic institutions other than the University of Virginia, and the lack of agreed upon national standards for the preparation of digital surrogates were other factors that were taken into account by the Committee in establishing these priorities.

Also at the September 23, 1998 VIVA Special Collections Committee meeting, Daniel Pitti, the developer of EAD and now the Project Director at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, gave an introductory workshop on the history, theory and development of EAD to date for the members of the Committee.

In January 1999, Pitti and Edward Gaynor conducted a two day VIVA funded workshop on EAD conversion for representatives of the participating institutions. This workshop served as an in-depth introduction to EAD for project coordinators. In June 1999, Pitti and Gaynor conducted a second two-day workshop for participants. Pitti discussed and critiqued finding aids that participants had marked up for EAD conversion following the January workshop. Extensive discussion of the American Heritage and Online Archive of California retrospective conversion guidelines followed. The VIVA Special Collections Committee accepts the principle established in previous collaborative projects that a reasonable amount of uniformity--both in the intellectual content and in the machine-readable representation or encoding of that content--is essential to make the union database possible; and that, for union database projects, this constitutes best practices. The second day of the June workshop was therefore devoted to developing an acceptable range of uniform practice for use by the participating institutions. Pitti is in the process of revising the retrospective conversion guidelines based on these discussions.

C. The Role of the University of Virginia.

The Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia Library has assumed the technological leadership for the Virginia Heritage Project and builds on expertise acquired in two recent grant-funded projects. The first of these, the recently-completed American Heritage Project involved the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Duke University, and the University of Virginia in a project funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The American Heritage Project built a shared database of EAD tagged finding aids describing and providing access to collections documenting American history and culture. The primary goal of this project was the development of a demonstration system, which provided a test bed to evaluate both the effectiveness of the prototype's "virtual archive" in providing access to distributed digital library resources, and the feasibility of the decentralized "real world" production methods that the project used to create it. This project also developed effective mechanisms to link and to integrate related collections contributed by different institutions so that they can be navigated as if they were part of a single, virtual collection. As its contribution to the Project, the University of Virginia's Special Collection Department tagged and delivered over 1,200 of its manuscripts finding aids (approximately 12,000 pages) to the union database. (URL: http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaead/cgi-bin/eadform.pl). During this project, the University of Virginia also developed a mechanism for delivering EAD tagged guides on the web so that they would be accessible to users with any type of web browser. OpenText software, the search engine for the University of Virginia's database, is a powerful full-text search engine that interacts with Perl scripts to convert documents encoded in the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the display encoding of the World Wide Web, on the fly.

In September 1998, the University of Virginia Library's Special Collections Department received a two-year grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to digitize, identify, arrange, describe and conserve the ca. 4,500 photographs of African-American educational scenes in the southern United States taken by Jackson Davis during the period 1915-1930 when he was affiliated with the General Education Board in New York City. The Jackson Davis Project (URL: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/small/jdavis/) will provide a model for the integration of state-of-the-art, standards-compliant information technology and scholarly research to make unique library resources more widely available and comprehensible, while at the same time preserving rare and fragile physical artifacts. The original photographic negatives (glass and celluloid) will be digitized and presented in a searchable database that will be freely accessible through the World Wide Web. In addition, each image will be researched to identify, where possible, individuals, locations, events and relevant historical and contextual information; this data will be incorporated into the web-accessible database. The collection will be described in detail and the descriptive guide tagged according to EAD standards and added to the Library's existing database of full-text searchable finding aids on the World Wide Web.

One of the major goals of the Virginia Heritage Project is the wide dissemination of the technical expertise developed by the Special Collections Department of University of Virginia Library in the aforementioned projects to the special collections departments of the other participating institutions.