The LD4P Program will be the glue that binds the institutional projects together. It will develop the new, distributed environment in which the six member institutions can interact. It will provide the social construct for continual engagement and exchange of ideas. It will establish and promote consistent protocols and procedures across the members.
The institutional projects are focused either upon the processing of special, local collections or the conversion of local workflows for more traditional materials. A library’s workflows are often particular to that institution. They develop organically from a complex mix of institutional policies, vendor services, choice of ILS (and its capabilities), and accepted standards (RDA, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging’s Bibliographic Standard Record (BSR), etc.). The goals, then, of the institutional projects are two. The first is more straightforward. Although identical workflows cannot be developed for all institutions, standards for the output of those workflows can be. This meets a library’s basic need to be able to ingest and use metadata created at other institutions. By focusing on different subject domains (e.g., cartographic, music, rare books), the group is trying to standardize the metadata output for the most common types of resources they will need to process. The second is more complex. Two institutions (The Library of Congress and Stanford) have chosen to look at the conversion of their local workflows to linked data as their institutional project. As all workflows are unique to that institution, they can be considered “institutional.” However, the benefits of these projects are numerous. First, they will demonstrate that the conversion of a workflow from acquisition to discovery is possible. They will identify the separate elements of the workflow that must be considered/converted. They will produce solutions to the various elements of their workflows that can become models for how other institutions could approach similar issues. And as they work through these workflows, they can do it in consultation with the other LD4P members so that common standards and protocols can be developed even if explicit workflows cannot be copied from institution to institution.
