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CENDI PRINCIPALS AND ALTERNATES MEETING |
U.S. Geological Survey
Reston, Virginia
April 15, 2003
WELCOME
Kent Smith, Chair of CENDI, opened the meeting at 9:15 am. He thanked USGS for hosting the meeting. Mr. Smith extended a special welcome to the new member, Government Printing Office (GPO), and T.C. Evans, the GPO CENDI Alternate. A certificate of appreciation was presented to Sheila McGarr who is leaving her position as Director of the National Library of Education to return to GPO. She thanked CENDI for the many opportunities it has afforded her and indicated that, even though she will not be a CENDI Principal, she hopes to continue to be involved in CENDI activities.
The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent federal agency aimed at building capacity, supporting core services, encouraging excellence, and fostering collaboration among the nation’s libraries and museums. It is the primary source for federal grants for U.S. libraries and museums. IMLS was created in 1996 from restructuring several federal programs; the library portion was moved from the Department of Education and grafted to the Institute of Museum Services.
IMLS has received significant budget increases for its core programs, up from $194.5 million in FY02 to $210.7 million in FY03 (7.7 percent). This is broken down into $187.7 million for libraries under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), $29 million funded under the Museum Services Act, and $35 million in directed appropriations. The total appropriations are actually $245 million. They are located in a building with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Hamanities (NEH), which are sister agencies. The combined appropriation of the NEA and NEH is $242 million. However, the President’s 2004 budget request recommends an increase of 15 percent over 2003, a 24 percent increase from 2002 to 2004.
Ninety-one percent of the funding from LSTA is distributed in formula grants to the state library administrative agency in each state. These grants are primarily for staff training, statewide licensing of digital resources, and other resource-sharing efforts.
IMLS provides support for museums through four grant programs that build capacity, enhance technology, and foster creativity. The output of one of these, the “Learning Opportunities Grants” (recently renamed “Museums for America”), has been difficult to evaluate because the money has historically gone into operating budgets and the specific accomplishments cannot be easily separated. However, IMLS is in the midst of a two-year process that requires applicants to link funds to strategic objectives. The grants can still be used for a wide range of needs, but the recipients must show impact through measurement and evaluation.
The National Leadership Grants Program supports innovation in services, development of best practices and demonstration programs in both museums and libraries. Successful programs have national impact, address national issues, and provide models that can be widely adapted. In 2002, over 100 awards were made under this program.
There are three funding categories under this program for libraries. Continuing education, curriculum development, and recruitment and retention support to library and information science education. The Research and Demonstration category encourages strong proposals for research in library science that have direct applicability to real-world situations. The Preservation or Digitization of Library Materials helps to preserve or digitize significant library resources.
Museum categories under the National Leadership Grants Program include “Museums Online,” which address the technological needs and issues of museums. This is the first federal program designed specifically to make technology resources available to all types of museums. “Museums in the Community” supports museum-community partnerships that enhance the quality of community life. Professional Practices supports projects that improve professional practices in the museum field, including projects to improve museum operations and training for professionals in the field.
There are also professional practices and models programs for library-museum collaboration. These projects show how museums and libraries can work together to expand their services to the public.
Part of the increase in IMLS’ FY2003 appropriation is an additional $10 million to support recruitment and education for the next generation of librarians. This initiative is popularly known as the “Laura Bush initiative”, because Mrs. Bush announced it. It addresses the looming shortage of professional librarians, many of whom will be retiring in the next twenty years. The goal is to recruit and educate the next generation of librarians, develop faculty to educate them, enable pre-professionals to make the transition to professional status, and provide the library community with information needed to successfully recruit and educate the next generation.
The IMLS authorizing legislation (the Museum and Library Services Act of 1996) expired on September 30, 2002. The House passed the reauthorization bill on March 6, 2003. There is significant bipartisan co-sponsorship and Administration support for a similar bill with higher appropriations levels in the Senate. IMLS is optimistic about early passage. The reauthorizing legislation takes the National Commission out of the statute, replacing it with the National Museum and Library Board.
Over the last several years, IMLS has had three basic themes – education, creating public value, and collaboration. These themes have guided the projects and management approaches.
An initiative referred to as “The Twenty-First Century Learner” develops new models of integrated action among formal and informal education institutions. It emphasizes the fact that formal education organizations are not the only ones that promote education. With the accelerated pace of change, lifelong learning is required and education is a community responsibility. For democracy to survive and thrive, we must live in a learning society, where learning is ubiquitous.
Just as the aim of the private sector manager is to produce private value, the public sector manager must produce public value. Value is determined not by the providers of services, but by the consumers. We need to pursue what the issues are in their daily lives and then respond to them. Focusing on creating value means evaluating and demonstrating impact. This is one reason why the IMLS provides training to grantees on outcome-based evaluation and requires grantees to develop outcome-based measures for the project’s success. In addition to quantitative measure, good, qualitative stories are important.
Collaboration is emerging as the strategy for the IMLS in the 21st century. Collaboration recognizes the intersection of interest, activity, and mission between the IMLS and other organizations. While librarians have a long history of sharing, collaboration isn’t easy. Dr. Martin quoted a definition of collaboration as “an unnatural act, practiced by non-consenting adults.” Fostering collaboration is difficult because there are significant differences among institutions, which must be recognized from the beginning in order to be overcome. It is even more difficult to collaborate with organizations outside the museum and library community. However, it is imperative for IMLS to find “nodes of intersecting interest and mission” among other players in the community.” To this end, IMLS is on the verge of signing an agreement with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Both groups recognize a convergence in the near future, with public broadcasters becoming more like libraries and museums, and libraries and museums becoming more like broadcasters.
To enhance the development of collaborative ventures, the IMLS recently created the position of Director for Strategic Partnerships. She is responsible for identifying opportunities for collaboration with other organizations in both the public and private sectors. The goal is to position the IMLS so that other organizations come to it when they want to involve museums and libraries in their projects; this is already beginning to happen. Dr. Martin encouraged further discussion between the CENDI agencies and the IMLS, since there are many intersections of interest.
The IMLS future agenda is very full. Under the E-Government Act, IMLS is one of the agencies charged to assist the OMB Administrator in developing online tutorials to explain how to access government information online. IMLS is also involved in the reauthorization of Head Start, working on how to build museums and libraries into the structure. IMLS is also participating in discussions of who should be the representatives to UNESCO, now that the U.S. has reentered that organization.
The central role of libraries and museums has not changed, but how and where
they do their work has changed. Digital/virtual library activities are also
funded. For example, the University of Illinois received funds for developing
collection level metadata for the Open Archives Initiative. The University of
Kentucky received funding for investigating the needs and developing a search
engine to support bioacoustic researchers. They have also funded some Digital
Rights Management projects. The challenge is to continue to support the traditional
environment while moving into the new.
"The Federal Enterprise Architecture: Models for
Data, Content and Business Processes"
Robert Haycock, Program Manager, Federal Enterprise Architecture Program
Office, Office of Management and Budget
The vision of E-government is an order of magnitude of improvement in the federal
government’s value to the citizen; with decisions in minutes or hours, not weeks
or months. In this context, the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) is a strategy
for ensuring the achievement of the President’s Management Agenda to make the
government more responsive and efficient.
There are five initiatives in the Presidents’ Agenda, which are all interwoven.
These initiatives are management of human capital, competitive sourcing, facilitating
the delivery of effective e-government services for or on behalf of citizens,
improved financial performance, and budget and performance integration.
The “Urgent Business for America: Revitalizing the Federal Government for the 21st Century”, a report of the National Commission on the Public Service published in January 2003, points to duplication, overlap, and gaps in government functions. Best practices in e-business show that processes must be simplified and the infrastructure unified around the customer in order to solve these problems. In E-government, the unification must be done around the citizens’ needs – the needs of the public, business, other governments, and the federal government for its internal efficiency. Simplification begins with a focus on the data stores, even at the point of creation. Unification is achieved by integrating access through common interfaces and portals.
The FEA for the first time provides a way to look at functions across the government, to identify opportunities for unification and collaboration, and to achieve simplification and Information Technology (IT) efficiencies. The FEA is made up of five reference models:
The last three models specifically address IT. They are interrelated with the Business RM. For each function-subfunction, there is a series of service components. These service components have specific data requirements and are supported by specific Technical Reference Models. For example, the Rule Management-Rule Publication subfunction has a series of services linked to it, including customer relationship management, knowledge management, searching (information retrieval), etc. Each one of these functions is supported by one or more technical platforms, data management technologies, and business logic sets dependent on the mode of delivery.
The FEA will have ramifications in other areas. A-130 will be rewritten to reflect the Federal Enterprise Architecture Model. This will probably occur during summer 2003. The E Government scorecard, which is now part of the budgeting process, gives points for collaboration. In the spirit of the Enterprise Architecture, it gives visibility to interagency initiatives such as CENDI.
Mark Forman’s position is that of Administrator of IT and E-Government. This is a statutory position. Mr. Forman will have responsibility for both OIRA and the IT group. How they begin to converge is still unknown.
"Connecting the NBII Nodes: Map Services Registry to Support Data Discovery
and Interoperability thru OGIS"
Donna Roy, NBII Program Office, USGS
The National Biological Information Infrastructaure’s (NBII) vision of geospatial access is that all resources, information, and data within the NBII Web, when spatially relevant, will be referenced and retrievable in an interoperable manner. This will extend the NBII’s capability of providing geography as key criteria for data gathering. Geospatial access allows users to ask for species or issues relevant to a particular location, to ask where the resource is located, and what other resources would be pertinent geographically to the one already known by the user. A variety of biological resources can be geolocated, including data from web pages and related resources, as well as areas on maps themselves. This allows the information to be visualized in a simple map viewing capability.
The NBII’s project includes three major components. Web pages are geographically referenced by cataloging with an extended Dublin Core metadata schema and providing search capabilities through maps or gazetteers. The second component adds a simple map viewing capability to the NBII Metadata Clearinghouse. The third component is a centralized map service registry. This component extends the search capabilities of the NBII to include interactive map resources as resources in addition to datasets or map layers. Users will be able to browse interactive map resources across the NBII nodes and applications will become interoperable.
There are a multitude of standards involved in maps, including those for describing resources such as Dublin Core and UDDI; those for geography such as the Open GIS Consortium; and those for biology such as the Darwin Core and the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS). The project is proving that these standards can work together. Ms. Roy is working with the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) to develop standards.
The Registry will generally be applied in two different ways. If a user is already aware of one map service, the user selects a map service of interest from the registry. The description of the map service includes the registry map service data. The system can then read the capabilities file per registry entry and present the user with a list of accessible layers in other NBII mapping resources from other nodes.
Alternatively, the user can access the registry from multiple “search based” entry points. The Registry can be accessed through the map viewer itself. It will also be found through one of many search engines, including the NBII search engine, the NBII Metadata Clearinghouse, and external search engines such as Google and Alta Vista.
The registry will be completed and available by early summer. The NBII will require its nodes to comply within six months of completion of the Registry. Code is also being developed to allow the ArcViewer to be put into any application.