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The Digital Library Federation as a Program in CLIR

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) was founded over 10 years ago, structured by several assumptions that became aspects of its mission. DLF was created to develop a programmatic focus that was relevant, viable, and of high distinction: to influence and shape the environment of digital library development (broadly defined); to provide a unique strategic advantage to its membership; and later to incubate projects that could become more widely adopted as components of a national digital library effort. In sum, DLF was inaugurated "to pioneer the use of electronic technology to extend collections and services." Yet during the decade since its founding, an astonishing degree of change has occurred in higher education, with most of these transformations a result of the increasing sophistication and power of digital technologies. When DLF began, there were no million-volume scanning projects underway; Google was a research project at Stanford; 'cyberinfrastructure' was a term used only among a small group of researchers; cloud computing had not been invented; and mobile technology was roughly the equivalent of a simple cell phone.

In the last ten years a wealth of complex and rigorous approaches to understanding, analyzing, and reconstituting data and information has emerged. These include large scale embedded sensing networks and an array of statistical methods of modeling those data; multivariate data analysis; the use of mobile devices to capture and classify images, audio, text, and locational information; the study of digital libraries as scaled information organizations and access tool repositories; theory and implementation of digital libraries; the digital environment as a 'place' for social interaction and community exchange; concepts of experimental design and communication of research; the study of knowledge representations and formal ontologies. Social computing, rapid prototyping, human-computer interaction, the economics of information, material language processing, and e-marketing are other areas of progressive research.

These advances in technology and new research methodologies will continue to influence the way a research library is defined, information technology services are organized, and the college and university is conceptualized. As a new program re-incorporated into CLIR, DLF offers the opportunity to build upon its original mission and refocus on issues and challenges specific to the second decade of the 21st century. Some of the services and programs listed are unique to DLF; others are integrated with CLIR's research agenda and entail collaboration with CLIR program officers and projects. With this organizational merger, DLF will provide vigorous support for its constituent organizations that is integral for their advancement, while capitalizing on the strengths of CLIR.

Under the leadership of the senior program officer, DLF will:

  1. Continue to focus on the technological aspects of developing, sustaining, and federating digital libraries. DLF will promote standards, protocols, and best practices; it will evaluate and promulgate digital library projects and programs, and support digital architectures that most effectively allow for interoperable and extensible digital resources and tools.
  2. Not attempt to build or develop projects in its name; rather, it will aggressively promote the digital production of its constituent institutional members, work with them to facilitate collaborations and cooperative efforts, and build a registry of projects and programs of wide interest and applicability.
  3. Invest in the DLF Forum as an important venue for better understanding the elements and complexity of digital library evolution. The Forum will be contextualized by other key conferences (e.g., Access, JCDL, ECDL, Code4Lib) while emphasizing its unique contribution: the Forum is a venue where ongoing research and development relevant to digital libraries can be candidly assessed and shared. It will allow developers to explore approaches that are successful but as importantly will allow for the discussion and scrutiny of projects that are not successful or are problematic. In this sense the forum represents an invaluable medium of exchange for programmers and developers without requiring a formal, finished piece of work as requisite for inclusion on its agenda.
  4. Promote the concept of an international/ global digital library in which all major projects and future developments need to be understood as interrelated components. DLF will seek more partnerships with major libraries and institutions overseas.
  5. Raise funds, not for DLF per se, but on behalf of its sponsoring organizations and, as importantly, work with the major funding agencies, private and public, to assist them in better understanding the interconnectedness of digital library development and to encourage them to fund projects in concert with one another to avoid redundancy and lost opportunities that can result from isolated, competitive funding schemes.
  6. Motivate an increasingly wider audience to become sponsors of DLF.
  7. Build stronger ties to corporations, especially those investing heavily in digital resources and large-scale digital assets, and connecting the corporations to the communities that can best advise and complement the corporate investment.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) will work with the senior program officer for DLF and its sponsors to contribute the following complementary enhancements to DLF's mission:

  1. Commission research studies and other reports that rigorously observe and extrapolate patterns, trends, and best practices in the digital library environment.
  2. Bring together new communities in the development, design, and architecting of digital libraries, which may include: representatives of the scholarly societies and practitioners of new digital research environments; representatives of the intelligence gathering agencies; graduate students doing advanced research at information schools (I-Schools).
  3. Identify, with appropriate support from economists and entrepreneurs, new approaches to investment in the digital environment by higher education institutions.
  4. Articulate qualities and characteristics of leadership in the coming decade, requisite for the changes and transformations ongoing.
  5. Communicate routinely and consistently with senior administrators in higher education to inform them of the opportunities, costs, and threats to higher education that pertain to a burgeoning, international digital library, and the consequences of failing to plan accordingly.

December, 2009

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