President's Message

I welcome you to CLIR’s new website, and hope that you find it useful and informative. Site content, traditionally rich, has been expanded to reflect the integration of the Digital Library Federation with CLIR. It is also now easier to engage with us, thanks to a range of new functionalities and tools for facilitating interaction, collaboration, and exchange.

The new website reflects CLIR’s interest in promoting discussion and action on challenges that can be addressed only through collaboration that is deep, coherent, and coordinated. Today we find ourselves in a constellation of academic villages that is redundant and expensive. Chief among the challenges, therefore, is to identify the larger-scale consortial models that can effectively reduce costs while enhancing the infrastructure and service provision for scholarship and teaching. Common to these efforts will be strong regional coalitions that bring together diverse institutions within a national framework; federating shared resources and interests, including collections, technology, and expertise; and a genuine, volitional dependency on other participating institutions for the provision of what was once a locally owned and managed asset.

There is no ambiguity: the future of academic libraries and higher education rests on the ability to reconceive ourselves holistically. The components of scholarly information-—discovering, reconstituting, publishing, and sharing knowledge, and keeping its various manifestations securely preserved and accessible—are interrelated and interdependent.

Much of CLIR’s activity centers on seeking partners to develop methods, guidelines, and recommendations that will allow academic leaders to instantiate sustainable communities of practice that together will produce a new, more logical and rational system of higher education. The projects and publications featured on this website touch on all facets of scholarly communication and represent a multitude of stakeholders.

As with so many aspects of the digital revolution, our future will turn less on technological innovation than on informed and empathetic leadership. CLIR, working with its constituency, will continue to define its leadership role as our highest priority as we seek together lasting solutions that are efficient, effective, and elegant.

— Charles Henry
January 2012