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Background and Purpose of this Meeting With an opening reception sponsored by Thomson Scientific on the evening of Thursday, October 5, the University Library of Frankfurt and the German-North American Resources Partnership (GNARP) and will be hosting an important two-day conference this Autumn in Frankfurt, Germany: »The World According to GNARP: Prospects for Transatlantic Library Partnership in the Digital Age« Sessions at this meeting will explore the wealth of library resources - archival, print, and digital - available to students and researchers (in Germany and the United States) in five selected subject areas: North American Studies, German Studies, Judaica, Africana, and South Asia/India, highlighting both existing avenues (and obstacles) for transatlantic resource sharing along with future prospects. In addition, several other important topics will be highlighted through individual presentations and panel discussions: the future of German as a language of the sciences; existing and planned electronic journal archives in Germany and the U.S.; print and digital repositories; and a special panel on »comparative cataloging cultures« on both sides of the Atlantic. The »World According to GNARP« conference will be taking place simultaneously with the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest book-related event in the world, attracting annually 285,000 visitors (2005), thus giving participants who arrive early the chance to combine attendance at both the Book Fair and Conference. A cultural event and dinner in Frankfurt are planned for Friday 6th October.
The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Alliance is an international community of about 100 libraries and partners like OCLC. For almost a decade the LOCKSS open source model has been tested for its robustness against attack and for its ability to migrate formats. LOCKSS »boxes« at 150 institutions in more than 20 countries comprise a peer-to-peer system that automatically cross-checks content to ensure the accuracy and completeness of all member archives. Eighty publishers, including large publishers like Oxford University Press, are now participating in LOCKSS or actively preparing to add their journals to the program.
The mission of the Harvard Judaica Collection is to comprehensively document Jewish history and civilization in all places and periods. To accomplish its mission, the Judaica Collection collects materials in all languages and in all formats—books, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers, sound recordings, and videos, posters, broadsides, and photographs. A particular focus is the Library’s Documenting Israel program, which covers all aspects of Israeli life and culture in great depth; Harvard has the largest collection of Israeli publications and Israel-related materials outside the State of Israel. The Harvard Judaica Collection also attempts to have comprehensive coverage of the publications of Jewish communities throughout the globe, including a significant collection of publications from countries across Europe. Collecting these materials requires cooperation with a wide array of institutions and individuals around the world.
The enhancing importance of digital documents has effected activities on how to deal with them. One line came from the more general field of "scientific publishing", which was handled in detail by DINI (Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation). But for this initiative long- time archiving was only one field of many and was not their primary focus. DINI first of all concentrated on the elaboration of effective and standardized methods and tools for publishing and related services on the basis of open access policy via the use of institutional repositories. The second line of projects came from the more general view of maintaining cultural heritage also in a digital world. Especially under the patronage of the Ministry of Education and Research important projects were being financed. Strategic solutions including archives, libraries, and museums are discussed and elaborated within NESTOR, where more technical solutions based on the term of practicability are developed within KOPAL. KOPAL brought together the industry (IBM) with a public- funded technical center (GWDG) and two libraries (DNB and SUB Göttingen). Within this project a general software implementation, which took into consideration all necessary international standards, could be finished last month and has been now for about two weeks. Based on early results within NESTOR it seemed important too, to strengthen all activities by giving them a legal basis. Therefore when the law changed concerning the German National Library from June 22nd this year (DNBG), the library was authorized with all the necessary instruments to collect digital documents in "non-physical" form as well. With this law at the moment Germany is in the rare position of being one of the few countries where the collection of network publications is part of the whole legal deposit strategy.
To stimulate further discussion, I would like to briefly tackle the following questions: * How can one become informed about what is going on in German Studies in the US? * What kinds of American guides to German resources are available? * What kinds of German Studies resources are being produced in the US? * What do we know about how scholars are using (or not) these guides and resources?
U. S. library resources on South Asia that were built around the limited needs of a handful of Sanskritics before World War II have made a long journey during the past half century. Since the inception of the Library of Congress Cooperative South Asia Acquisition Program (formerly called "PL-480" program), in 1962, libraries have built significant collections with financial support from governmental agencies and philanthropic foundations, to support teaching and research in all areas of social sciences and humanities. These collections have been supplemented by efforts to build retrospective collections and to microfilm rare materials in British and South Asian libraries and archives. Today, in cooperation with South Asian libraries, several projects are underway to preserve and digitize rapidly deteriorating materials so that these riches can be shared with the global scholarly community through electronic means.
A number of pressures on academic libraries imperil the long-term survivability of printed knowledge and heritage materials. Ever-growing volumes of materials, costs of preserving and delivering paper-based research resources, and researchers’ growing demand for source materials in electronic formats all produce strain on our institutions. ...
The University library in Frankfurt/Main owns the largest collection of literature on Judaism and Israel in Germany and one of the major collections in the world. Its task is to document the history of the Jewish people and to serve as a resource for study and research in Germany. The Jewish Division is therefore collecting all relevant national and international publications covering all aspects of post-biblical Judaism and Jewish culture in a most comprehensive manner, as well as all publications on the modern State of Israel. Two databases offer access to the large collections of the Judaica-Division. Yiddish Literature is the database that offers online access to the page images of the outstanding historical Yiddish collection, containing about 800 extremely rare and precious Yiddish and German-Jewish books printed in Hebrew letters from the 16th century onwards. Compact memory is a gateway to more than 100 Jewish periodicals in the German language area published in the 19th and 20th century, providing partly images, partly full-text-search and a bibliographic database of articles. The implementation of a third, new digital project, the »Virtual Judaica-collection« has just started - the digitization and online-presentation of the historical Judaica resources. Formed by his curator Prof. Aron Freimann, it was the largest and most significant Judaica collection on the European continent before the war. The goal is to offer free access to about 18.000 books with 2 Mill. pages over the web. In light of these developments, the presentation will evaluate the current possibilities of German-North-American cooperation in the area of digital projects.
The paper will provide a brief background to the history of the organization and cooperative efforts of African studies librarians in the United States including their efforts at international cooperation. Particular emphasis will be placed on the current opportunities for improved cooperation as digitization activities increase. Examples will include the DISA and Aluka initiatives and well as the Timbuktu manuscript digitization project at the Center for Research Libraries. Particular emphasis will placed on the possibilities for German-North American cooperation in the area of digital projects of historical photographs given the extensive collections held at Northwestern and Frankfurt.