Scholarship, Instruction, and Libraries at the Turn of the Century

APPENDIX C
ACLS-CLIR Program Initiatives

Given the presence of a global network, promote global participation in making scholarly resources available; identify and stimulate the growth of programs involving non-North American collaboration for development and distribution of digital information resources.
Identify the state of network infrastructures in a few key countries (including the major industrialized countries and a sampling of developing countries); update continuously; publish the results of the survey assessment, with hyperlinks to appropriate Web pages.

Survey the state of availability of audio materials for scholarship and teaching on the network.
Survey the state of information technology available to principal audio archives, including state and federal collections.
Promote participation of audio industry for (1) and (2) above by communicating to the industry, the importance of non-commercial uses of audio material on the network to the intellectual community.

Publish widely the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) projects that are underway in libraries and archives, and attempt to identify projects proposed for conversion of finding aids to EAD.
Continue the investigation of acceptable techniques for digital preservation; publish ever more widely the ongoing saga of this investigation in the journals of each and every constituent member of ACLS and its sister organizations.

The plight of not-for-profit scholarly publishing needs to be more widely known and understood. For-profit scientific publishers have so increased prices that the cost of subscriptions has come to take up a disproportionate share of library budgets, and humanities-based monographs have become more and more underrepresented. ACLS and CLIR should monitor the evolution of scholarly communications practices and regularly distribute information about the implications to the higher education community.
ACLS-CLIR might commission a study of the prospects for truly innovative research using digital information resources. CLIR and ACLS should follow these developments closely and provide follow-on investigation, analysis and publication of relevant Web sites. More convenient tools for discovery, retrieval, manipulation, and analysis are needed for the publishing genres of monographs, journals, and of related materials such as social scientific data sets and collections of digital source materials in all disciplines. Word searching and counting and analysis tools are common, but some linguists are involved in more daring and extensive research involving meaning, investigation of generative techniques, and word/term association tools which could be suitable for wider application.

ACLS and CLIR should convene museum and library curators to discuss the most productive way to provide digital surrogates of visual resources on the Web, taking into consideration issues of authenticity, intellectual property rights, and costs.