CLIR Annual Report: 1998 – 1999

Leadership initiatives aimed at public libraries, community information networks, and library education, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, drew to a close this year. CLIR continued to host a Public Access Network Directory on its Web site to connect community networks with public library outreach efforts. We have worked closely with the Benton Foundation to create a video that will help community leaders to think collectively about all of the cultural agencies in the community that provide information resources. The video will be distributed in the fall of 1999.

Consultant Liz Bishoff completed an evaluation of grants that Kellogg made to schools of information and library studies as part of its program for Human Resources in Information Systems Management (HRISM). Four such schools had received grants to reform their curricula in response to changes in technology and a desire to align curricula with community needs. Ms. Bishoff found that the curricular reform has, for the most part, resulted in the hoped-for changes.

The CLIR Board continued its discussions about the need to reconceptualize library and information science education. Additional work in this area will be part of next year’s agenda.

The first Frye Leadership Institute is scheduled for June 4–16, 2000.

Planning for the Frye Leadership Institute has been in high gear this year. The Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE were each invited to name three members to an advisory committee to help plan the curriculum and to develop recruitment strategies. The first Institute is scheduled for June 4–16, 2000. The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation has provided major support for the Institute. CLIR, EDUCAUSE, and Emory University are partners in the effort through their cash contributions to the Institute.

In June 1999, the family and friends of Patricia Battin established a scholarship endowment in her honor, to provide financial assistance for promising participants in the Frye Leadership Institute whose institutions cannot afford to support their attendance.

The College Libraries Committee, in cooperation with CLIR program staff, developed case studies describing innovative uses of technology for information services on college campuses. The nine case studies were used as background information for a conference at the Belmont Conference Center on March 25–26, 1999. College administrators, faculty, information technologists, and library directors discussed the implications of digital technology for teaching and learning. The participants encouraged CLIR to take the following steps:

• distribute the case studies widely
• convene additional meetings with deans, provosts, and presidents to discuss the digital future
• explain, through conferences and publications, the implications of changes in the scholarly communication system

The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century, edited by Brian Hawkins and Patricia Battin, was published by CLIR and the Association of American Universities in August 1998. The book has been the subject of many conference sessions and has been widely distributed to higher education administrators.

In May 1999, CLIR awarded the third A. R. Zipf Fellowship to Debra Ruffner Weiss, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Zipf Fellowship was established to recognize a graduate student who shows exceptional promise for leadership and technical achievement in information management. For 10 years before entering the doctoral program at UNC, Ms. Weiss worked in the creation of large-scale information systems. Her current research focuses on developing network-based middleware services that enable high-performance data sharing among Internet2 universities and other organizations.