For HNN by Yuta Usuda
West Virginia librarians have been eager to see a statewide online library for five years, in one aspect, the state is ready to launch the digital library, but in the other aspect, still not yet.
The resource subcommittee of the West Virginia Digital Library has already discussed what types of online materials to purchase, and the steering committee has established a Web site at www.wvdl.org.
The steering committee just needs to receive the fund from the West Virginia Commission, but the committee’s 12 administrative agent members do not know when the state Legislature will approve the $1.5 million grant to the commission.
“We just keep asking in order to grow,” said Barbara Winters, chair of the digital library steering committee.
The digital library will annually cost $1.5 million, which was revised from $1.7 million. The figure is economical in light of the state’s public school enrollment, which counted 286,785 K-12 students in 2001, Winters said.
The state Department of Education spent $6,953.14 per K-12 student. Establishing the digital library would cost just another $5.23 a student. “$5.23 is a very good buy,” Winters said.
The number shrinks when it includes other users, the state’s population of 1.8 million.
James D. Waggoner, deputy director of the West Virginia Library Commission, said the commission still has no money in the digital library budget. The greatest amount of the commission's budget discretion is the federal funds, but their maximum amount is $1.1 million, which cannot satisfy the digital library request.
“Grants are given for a specific purpose and for a specific time frame,” Waggoner said. “If we sought a grant for the digital library, it would only be funded for the life of the grant, and then we would have to find continuing support funding.”
The library commission’s budget begins the process from what the commission received in the previous year. Anything beyond that funding level turns an improvement package, so the library commission has submitted an improvement package for the digital library, Waggoner said.
“One of the other reasons for making the request through the improvement package is the project would then become a part of our base budget and would be included automatically in the coming year's budgets,” Waggoner said.
The West Virginia Digital Library is a consortium of West Virginia libraries. It provides statewide access to electronic books, magazines and other digital information through public, college and K-12 libraries.
“It will bring tons of benefits for the state,” said Winters, who is also the dean of University Libraries at Marshall University. “We want to get everyone in the state the same access to the same set of the core resource, no matter how rich or poor, where they live. Equality of information access is our goal.
“Having access of information is the foundation for all literacy problem for K-12, for economic development, for job creation and for research,” said Winters, who was a librarian at the University of Georgia from 1998 to 2000. During those years, she chaired the Collection Development Committee for the GALILEO Project, which was similar to the digital library.
Students in Monongalia can visit West Virginia University’s libraries and students in Cabell County could go to Marshall University to do research. But in a current situation, students in Mingo County lack accesses to those university libraries, Winters said. The statewide network will provide all of West Virginia’s population access to the same content through the Internet.
Winters gave the other example. Students in one high school may have eight magazines at its library, but the students will be able to take a look at 800 magazines by using the digital library
.
A 1999 study (www.wwwmetrics.com) showed people can access only “surface Web,” less than seven percent of information on the Web, by using popular search engines, including Google (www.google.com), Alta Vista (www.altavista.com) and Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com), Winters said. No search engine indexes more than 16 percent of the surface Web. “The Internet is not a library, and that much of it cannot be considered appropriate for research,” she said.
Forty-four states have already established digital libraries for their citizens: Ohio with the Ohio Link, Kentucky with the Kentucky Virtual Library, Virginia with the Virtual Library of Virginia.
“West Virginia is already lagging behind on this frontier,” Winters said.
Waggoner said, “I agree we are falling behind other states. West Virginia has previously been recognized as a national leader in library technology. Our state needs to offer its citizens this opportunity.”
