CLIRinghouse Number 9

The Issue for Presidents and CAOs:

Getting Full Value From Campus Information Resources

• 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

Some Approaches:

Special Services Encourage Collaboration

• Faculty and IT staff have joined librarians at five primarily undergraduate institutions—Connecticut College, Dartmouth, Trinity, Wesleyan, and Williams—to 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: