Bruce Schatz of the University of Illinois introduced the discussion of structure of digital library initiatives at the plenary session. He suggested a pyramid of activities whose costs are shared among partners. A central aim should be to leverage funds and communities with a series of projects designed to draw on existing knowledge bases to produce a high return for low cost.
There was general agreement over the days of the workshop that any new initiative should be structured to encompass a "diversified portfolio" of research, embracing small and large, highly specific and highly general research trajectories. These would call for strategically structured funding initiatives involving cooperative agreements and grants with the various partners suggested in the previous section.
There was widespread agreement that to pursue the full range of research questions embraced by the digital library, small projects working in tandem with larger ones would be particularly efficacious. These could produce diversity without duplication and coordination without stifling of initiative. Both will be needed to pursue the different kinds of interoperability. Such a structure would also allow several projects to work around a particular testbed, allowing the digital collection to coordinate the research community (much as text collections have done in the past). It was generally agreed that one of the beneficial outcomes of the first initiative and related efforts is a cooperative community of digital library researchers and that a new initiative should seek to foster a similar but larger community.
Instead of the handful of projects of the first initiative, many proposed these alliances as a way to increase the number of projects by one or even two orders of magnitude without having a similar effect on cost. It was also suggested that different projects be organized with different periodicity to provide successive waves of research, building on antecedents, within the overall funding cycle.
It was suggested that such projects be selected with a mix of the following attributes
research projects--projects to engage in new research directions that will not likely be addressed by industry or routine implementation projects.
testbed projects--building environments to support, focus, and inform research work, and
clearinghouse projects--to gather and disseminate existing research, testbeds and tools.
It was suggested that projects could be funded for as little as $100,000 per year to as much as $5,000,000.
It was suggested that funding should be as much through cooperative agreements as through direct grants.
Sponsor funding of DLI has been leveraged in the ratio 1:1 to 2:1 ($2 of matching by cash or in kind per $1 of Federal support) depending on the particular project. Similar or higher levels should be pursued on future projects:
· Testbed projects should be highly leveraged because of prior work and the potential support of commercial interests.
· Clearinghouse projects can be highly leveraged if ties are made to other clearinghouse or repository projects.
· Research projects must be highly leveraged because of their cost and because their success depends on partnerships.
Projects might run for from two to five years. The former might be adequate for small projects. Larger projects would need the longer time to deliver robust results.