Sustainability Issues and Activities for the NSDL David J. McArthur Computer Science Department University of North Carolina, Wilmington dmcarthur1@nc.rr.com Sarah Giersch Consultant University of North Carolina, Wilmington sgiersch@bellsouth.net Howard Burrows Senior Researcher Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute ghburrows@attbi.com Abstract This poster will review the work on sustainability of digital libraries in the context of the NSF-supported National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program. Applied to digital libraries, sustainability is a broad term, referring to everything from technical issues about the digital preservation of materials, to the social questions surrounding the long-term accessibility of resources to the public at large. INTRODUCTION The NSDL is a highly distributed and loosely coupled set of digital collections, knit together by a centralized Core Integration (CI) project that provides a common infrastructure for the collections. Sustainability is especially important to the NSDL since its mission is to become one of the premier sources of digital educational materials in the country. To achieve this goal, it will have to tackle issues of growth and long-term stability from many perspectives. Overall, the NSDL faces at least two kinds of sustainability problems: the NSDL as a whole must grow and ensure the availability and preservation of digital materials for users; and, the projects that provide NSDL with content, services and tools must also acquire the financial and social resources they will need to survive beyond their current short-term funding. ISSUES & ACTIVITIES This poster will review the work of different NSDL groups that are contributing ideas about sustainability—principally the Sustainability Standing Committee (SSC), the Policy Committee (PC) and the CI—and will discuss their recent plans, activities and results. These include: • Investigating traditional business models for the NSDL. As a result of discussions begun at a workshop with educational publishers [3], the NSDL has considered various partnerships opportunities with the traditional publishing community, which involve providing content or services to generate revenue. The poster will summarize a number of these alternatives, including: selective contributions from publishers to the NSDL; using materials from NSDL collections to provide digital collateral resources for publishers’ e-books; and, the role the NSDL in providing an intellectual “commons” through which new tools and services could be developed for publishers and the digital library community. • Considering non-traditional business models for NSDL. Traditional business models for the NSDL roughly equate to ones where end-users pay either directly or indirectly (e.g., through institutional licenses). However, the NSDL is also considering a number of more innovative approaches, such as the possibility of large-scale public investments in the national digital library infrastructure [1] on the ambitious scale of the Land-Grant Colleges Act of the 19 th century, as well as open-source and open-access business models. • Analyzing the business costs of building and maintaining a large-scale digital library. Regardless of the revenue streams the NSDL eventually establishes, it will also need a good understanding of its costs, including not only one-time and recurring requirements, but also the timing of these funds, likely sources, and the obligations that may go with support from various funding institutions. Recent NSDL studies have begun to consider these issues. • Establishing a Governance and Organization Task Force. Pathways to Progress [2], established an interim governance structure for the NSDL, and provided an action-plan for the design and implementation of the federated library and its infrastructure. A task force has been formed recently to consider other governance models. The early thinking of this group will be reviewed in the poster, keeping in mind that no authoritative steps to reshape the current governance structure, or establish a legal entity for the NSDL, are likely to be taken for several years. REFERENCES [1] Grossman, K. and Minow, N. A Digital Gift to the Nation: Fulfilling the Promise of the Digital and Internet Age. The Century Foundation Press, New York, NY, 2001. [2] Manduca, C., McMartin, F. and Mogk, D. Pathways to Progress: Vision and Plan for Developing NSDL. (2001), http://www.nsdl.org. [3] McArthur, D., Giersch, S., Wittenberg, K. and Luby, M. NSDL & Educational Publishers’ Workshop Report. (Columbia University, October 2002), http://publishers.comm.nsdlib.org Proceedings of the 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’03) 0-7695-1939-3/03 $17.00 © 2003 IEEE