610 Quincy St. Rapid City, SD 57701 605-394-6139 www.rapidcitylibrary.org

Conference Call

Wednesday, February 16, 2005 9:30 – 10:30 a.m. MT

Steering Group: Colleen Smith, Dorothy Liegl, Greta Chapman

The discussion focused on the following topics:

Project Management:

Inventory

Partners

Vendor research

Estimated costs

Stakeholders agreement

Legislation

Grant applications

Stakeholders Meeting tentative 3.2

The State Library Staff will check on availability for a DDN meeting on Wednesday, March 2, 3:30 – 4:30 CT and 2:30 – 3:30 MT. Sites scheduled are: Vermillion, Watertown, Yankton, Sioux Falls, Pierre, and Mitchell. RCPL staff will confirm the number of participants for a minimum of 8 – 10 to confirm the meeting. This meeting would be for the purpose of determining interest and initial costs of the project in order to talk with librarians and potential funders throughout the state. A second all day meeting Thursday, March 24 in Pierre is being planned for demonstration of products, gathering interested participants statewide, and review of potential funding resources.

Historical – Public Domain Copies

Historical – Public Domain copies up to 1922. South Dakota participated in the US Newspaper Project (USNP) and there is a comprehensive microfilm inventory of state wide newspapers. Some of the earlier newspapers have some quality concerns, but none the less are microfilmed. The Library of Congress (LC) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are in partnership for picking up digitization of public domain newspapers from the initial start up of the USNP project. NEH is the federal funding source and grants were recently awarded for large pilot projects. Applications for the next round of funding will be spring 2006. In addition, several U.S. states have initiated funding for digitizing public domain copies.

Copyright

Copyright newspapers for small SD towns are now available from the SD Newspaper Association database purchased by the State Library. All towns are included with the exception of Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and Aberdeen. Sioux Falls and Aberdeen are available full text from the Newsbank database. The Rapid City Journal is not available through a vendor database but does have online access through their website through 2002. G. Chapman will be working with the Journal to determine costs for access.

Inventory of Public Domain Microfilm – Phase One “most critical”

Given the availability of microfilm, the discussion focused upon overall cost estimates for digitizing existing microfilm into indexed full text articles. OCLC has submitted estimated costs as a potential vendor for $5,000 of 2,400 newspaper pages. D. Liegl will work with L. Rose for cost estimates based on the number of pages for microfilming. G. Chapman will also provide cost estimates based on 2,400 given contacts made by RCPL to a number of vendors. The number of microfilmed pages will quite likely cause the project to be completed in phases due to costs. A recommendation for a first phase is “most critical.” Most critical is defined as articles related to South Dakota economic and territorial beginnings, i.e. mining, ranching, larger towns such as Yankton, Pierre, Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Watertown, Huron, and Aberdeen. The definition would be flexible to allow interested parties beyond those named to be included based upon discussion of economic and territorial beginnings and partnership funding. Partnership funding will be required of all microfilm digitized.

Estimated Costs

State, federal and institutional funding resources were discussed. The federal funding is a grant application available in 2006. Funding requirements are 80% federal and 20% participant. Given the need for participants to provide funding at the federal level it was determined a need to continue funding match at a state level. Depending upon costs and available funding, a range of 20 – 50% matching was discussed. Approximate costs are being determined based upon the most critical definition for the number of pages and external or internal hosting of the database. OCLC has quoted a cost of $4,000 to host 2,400 pages as an external host. C. Smith will contact Liz Bischoff for information on hosting the database internally perhaps at the State Library and/or SDLN.

In addition to matching funds, there is also the consideration to advocate for compensation to the State Archives Budget at an estimated cost of revenue loss. Their budget currently receives $6,000 annually for microfilm rental. It would be valuable to have them as partners in the project and perhaps their revenue loss could be advocated for within the state funding request.