 |
 Quick insight into information-investment
issues for presidents, CAOs, and other
campus leaders from the Council on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR)
Number 9, May 2002
The Issue for Presidents and CAOs:
Getting Full Value From Campus Information
Resources |
New academic resources are arising all over the campus at
universities and colleges large and small:
- A professor creates an electronic database to facilitate
work on a special project.
- Collaborating scholars set up a Web site for reporting
research results quickly.
- A teacher develops a digital syllabus with links to assigned
readings.
- A learning center creates computer-generated course materials.
- A department such as art or architecture digitizes image
collections.
- A campus museum puts a digital exhibit online.
Potentially, some of these can be long-term assets for the
institution. But can anyone other than their creators find
them? And will even the creators preserve them for future use?
If not, campus executives may be failing to get full value
from aids to teaching and research that the institution finances
directly or indirectly. |
The Challenge:
How to Leverage What's Arising Outside the
Library |
Librarians share this concern. Traditionally they safeguard
and make accessible the intellectual resources that support
teaching and research. And as they develop digital libraries,
many want to incorporate at least some of the many kinds of
digital resources created by scholars on their campuses outside
the library.
Many useful and exciting digital creations develop within
academic departments, research labs, classrooms, information
technology units, and professors' offices. But, too often,
independently operating creators use whatever software will
work without thinking of access-system compatibility or long-term
preservation.
Moreover, some professors and departments eschew the library
to avoid having to meet library standards and specifications
for technological integration into the library system to make
their products more secure and accessible. What can be done? |
Some Approaches:
Special Services Encourage Collaboration |
At two recent Digital Library Federation (DLF) forums, members
of the DLF discussed how their digital infrastructure developments
could be more accommodating to digital products from outside
the library, and how their guidance could ease the integration
of digital libraries with instructional technologies and scholars'
projects. Some libraries also are developing services to improve
the situation.
- Faculty and IT staff have joined librarians at five primarily
undergraduate institutionsConnecticut College, Dartmouth,
Trinity, Wesleyan, and Williamsto develop a Curricular
Resource Library (CuRL) of pedagogically useful Internet
resources.
- The California Digital Library serves all University of
California schools with an "E-Scholarship Repository" that
enables scholars to make their working papers easily discoverable.
- Cornell and Duke operate Project Euclid, providing electronic
publishing services for small-circulation journals in math
and statistics whose editors retain content control.
- An aggregator at the University of Minnesota called IMAGES
makes storage and access support available to digital-image
collection developers university-wide.
- The University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office
provides electronic publishing assistance to faculty authors.
- MIT's D-Space Project is developing a digital archive
of all MIT electronic intellectual output that will enable
faculty to manage their own digital material.
For the user, systems disconnections inhibit access to academic
assets. For the academic executive, that is a waste. The goal
is to enable students and faculty to identify and use digital
information developed on campus, wherever created and controlled,
for as long as such assets can be useful. |
Additional Information:
|
For more about efforts mentioned in this issue, see the following
Web sites:
|
|
