CLIR Annual Report, 2011-2012
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Letter from the President and Chairman 
The Return on Investment
Reflecting on the past year, we can see clearly that CLIR is continuing to build vigorously upon its mission: forging strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments. In doing so, CLIR has formed collaborative partnerships with libraries, cultural institutions, and associations of higher learning to train an emerging profession in service to advanced research (postdoctoral fellows in data curation), to create a registry that ties together scores of institutions and hundreds of valuable rare and special collections that otherwise would remain out of sight and inaccessible (hidden collections), and to mentor a growing cohort of future leaders (through the Frye Leadership Institute, now the Leading Change Institute).
As an organization that relies on its sponsors for financial support, we are always aware of the issue of “return on investment.” What do our hundreds of sponsors receive from CLIR that is especially valuable, unique, and integral to their advancement? CLIR’s research reports and array of communication types (e.g., routine publications, blogs, colloquiums, online connections, and posting spaces) are among the most respected and cited of their kind. The reincorporation of the Digital Library Federation has stimulated a cadre of technical experts to work more closely together on a variety of projects and issues. CLIR also lends its talented staff to important projects on behalf of our sponsors, such as the Digital Public Library of America and the Digital Preservation Network, particularly when those projects hold considerable promise for our successful evolution in a digital era.
In addition, CLIR raises grant funds that are redirected to our sponsors and partnering communities. Over the last seven years, CLIR has allocated $70,000 for our Zipf fellows; $2,000,000 for dissertation fellowships; $1,500,000 for the Early English Book Project; more than $800,000 for postdoctoral fellowships; $158,000 for participatory design workshops; approximately $626,000 for the Communities of Knowledge project; and more than $10,000,000 in grants for our Hidden Collections program. This Council believes strongly in reinvesting assets to enhance our sponsors’ ability to innovate, to help make their resources available to a wider public, and to foster new discovery.
During this past year, CLIR has initiated a variety of new projects designed and managed by our staff. They have focused on topics of immense complexity and urgency, with potentially transformative results. The expansion of our postdoctoral fellows program into data curation is one of these. Anvil Academic Publishing is another. Anvil is a partnership of universities and colleges that will guide the migration from printed books and journals to fully digital objects of expression. These new forms of scholarship—which are often richly layered works that can include not only the product of the research, but also extensive data (e.g., text, image, sound), algorithms, visualization tools, and linkages to other relevant research—will not “fit” into a printed page. Anvil will explore ways to capture and sustain the complex environment in which these discoveries are made and promulgated. Anvil’s business model is also indicative of CLIR’s mission. Relatively modest subscriptions from collaborating institutions are pooled with significant grant money to leverage their contributions. Whereas even large institutions cannot afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to migrate to a digital publishing platform, Anvil and its partners can accomplish that migration in an efficient and cost effective way with a smaller investment from each.
Finally, much of this year has been devoted to developing CLIR’s Committee on Coherence at Scale. The committee, composed of presidents, provosts, and leaders in library and technology spheres, will work to correlate and bring coherence to the many very large-scale digital projects in the United States. Its goals are ambitious: to develop methods, guidelines, and recommendations that would allow academic leaders to instantiate sustainable communities of practice that would in concert produce a new, more logical, and more rational system of higher education. The committee can assist in reconceptualizing the traditional model of competing, stand-alone institutions into a coherent system of higher education that preserves the identity and independence of universities and colleges, but brings together many of the functions and support services that undergird scholarship and teaching. Such a system would contribute to a well-wrought and sustainable communal good.
Working at the nexus of higher education administration, librarianship, information technology, and scholarly communication, CLIR is uniquely positioned to accomplish these tasks. And, as always, this work will be conducted explicitly on your behalf.
Charles Henry
President
Stephen Nichols
Chairman