Financial/Business Models Appendix A: Questions

About

The DPLA concept currently has no limits with respect to content, scope, audience, participation, or governance. Without some direction, it is difficult to pursue funding and create a business model for the DPLA. These are questions that need to be answered before we can proceed. Questions were generated during the Financial/Business Model workshop held in Ann Arbor, MI on March 13, 2012.

General Questions for the DPLA Leadership

• When can we expect a list of things to fund? We are stalled without more information.

• Does the Financial/Business Model workstream have access to grant resources? Can we gain access to the budget, the grant, the grant proposal, and proposed deliverables?

• Realistically, if the DPLA is a team of 30 people, we are talking about 3-4 million annually plus heat, rent, etc. We need to think about where that will come from year after year.

Content & Scope Questions

• What kinds of content (format, topic) will be in the DPLA?

• Do we have one or two willing and able contributors to get things up and running (as a seed collection)? HathiTrust? Internet Archive?

• If the focus is on cultural heritage, what does that exclude?

• Will the scope be international? There are many tricky intellectual property rules about sharing content across national borders; there are no worldwide rights.

• To what extent will DPLA be digitizing things?

• Are government documents being considered early on in the offerings?

• Will we normalize the metadata we ingest or allow only metadata that meets a minimum standard into the DPLA?

• Can we switch the order of Tier 2 (copyrighted information) and Tier 3 (user-generated information), as Tier 2 is the hardest to accomplish?

• Will content and/or metadata be DPLA centralized or linked to the home institution or linked to the node?

• Will some nodes offer full-text search? Others not?

• Do we need to find a host for content?

• Are nodes more of an infrastructure component or content contributor (or both and how)?

• How important are published materials for this enterprise? Non-published materials?

• Are we thinking library or cultural stuff like Europeana (artifacts as well)? Museums, archives? (Yes, definitely.)

• Can there be a super-node, of say aggregates of historical societies that already deposit content centrally?

• CLIR grants to capture metadata on hidden collections: can this go into DPLA?

o 16 million $ since 2008 – 65 grants. http://www.clir.org/hiddencollections

o Will this help people identify candidates for digitization?

• Who are the initial people and data involved in the DPLA already? (Has the technical workstream collected content?)

Governance Questions

• Will DPLA be embedded in another organization? Overhead implications?

• How will the transition go? Interim leadership for the DPLA? Who will be a decision-maker? The Steering Committee?

• What is the model for decision-making?

• How do you get to be a node? What’s in the MOU to be a node?

• Do nodes have a say in governance? Do I have a seat at the decision-making table? Passive partner? Is there a council of nodes?

• If you have 30 tech people in an office with an executive director, and 70 nodes, who‘s telling whom what to do? Who has the money?

o Is the voting seat at the table proportional to some aspect of the node?

Marketing Questions

• Will contributors retain their brand?

• What distinguishes the DPLA from the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, etc? What is the value we are adding?

• Can we get funding for market research? What do users want from the DPLA? What can we offer contributors or nodes to make this venture worth it to them?

Audience & Participation Questions

• Who is the primary beneficiary of the DPLA?

o How do we define who the beneficiaries are?

o Are you marketing to the supply side? The demand side? Both? Which is more important? Do we provide service to nodes?

o Is this primarily about the direct-to-consumer offering? Or a benefit to institutions? This is important to address from a symbolic point of view. The more this is a direct consumer offering the more this is disintermediating the traditional library.

• What’s the nature of the engagement with public libraries, state libraries, and academic libraries?