Digital Library Forum – Spring 2007
| Pages | 4-6 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050710824651 |
| Published date | 07 August 2007 |
| Date | 07 August 2007 |
| Author | Colby Riggs,Holly Tomren |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Digital Library Forum – Spring 2007
Colby Riggs and Holly Tomren
4LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 7 2007, pp. 4-6, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050710824651
The Digital Library Forums (DLF) are
held twice a year. The Forum is attended
by digital library practitioners from
member institutions. It provides
opportunities: for DLF committees to
define and pursue their initiatives and to
present their work to the broader
membership; for practitioners to share
experiences and practices with one
another and to support a broad level of
information-sharing between professional
staff; and for the DLF to review and
assessitsprogramsanditsprogresswith
input from the broader membership
community. The following is a report of
the DLF Spring Forum 2007 held in
Pasadena, California from 23-25 April,
2007.
The Forum opened with introductory
remarks from Peter Brantley, Executive
Director, Digital Library Federation
(www.diglib.org/). Brantley’s DLF
Turning Points included comments on
several factors impacting libraries such
how libraries are under tremendous
competitive pressure; libraries have
progressively unsupportable structure of
academic library expenditures; and our
major investments in print collections
are too high of an opportunity cost given
our new services expectations. Brantley
offered several ‘‘optimistic’’ plans to
help us at this ‘‘crossroads at this time’’
such as how libraries can alter and shift
current staff, modernize pre-industrial
workflow, quarantine freed budgets
and gain new funding partners. He
summarized the solution as ‘‘go local’’
and ‘‘integrate at scale.’’ This means we
should recognize our local strengths and
establish content at a level that is
network accessible.
More specifically he stated we need
to build a network-based preservation
service with easy-to-use, end-user
oriented tools. This new toolset will be a
keystone of a successful infrastructure.
He encouraged us to re-imagine
publishing and work with academic
presses to re-shape scholarly
communication. The future interface is
not about clusters, facets or links but an
online integration of information flow,
and not the integration of content but an
integration of services. He emphasized
the fact that our patrons are portable and
we need to know where they are, so we
need to focus on computing and
communicating that is lightweight.
Included in these concepts are words
such as handheld, mobile, many and
modalities. Brantley concluded his
opening remarks with thoughts on
embracing virtual worlds which are
immersive, by learning through new
experiences and encouraging us to re-
think our interactions among people and
things.
The following are highlights of the
Forum sessions.
The session ‘‘Content Proliferations:
Libraries and Publishers’’ explored
various emerging publishing models.
Charles Henry, President of the Council
on Library and Information Resources
(CLIR) opened the panel discussion
with a description of the reopening of
the Rice University Press as a fully
digital university press. The Rice
University Press has returned from a
decade-long hiatus. The Press aims to
explore models of peer-reviewed
scholarship for the 21st century. The
technology gives authors a way to use
multimedia to publish their scholarly
works, and to publish on-demand
original works in fields of study that are
increasingly constrained by print
publishing. Henry described how
generally university presses are losing
money at unprecedented rates and with
this new technology the Press can offer
ways to decrease production costs and to
provide nearly ubiquitous delivery
system, the internet. He described how
they avoided costs associated with
backlogs, large inventories and unsold
physical volumes, and greatly improved
the speed of the editorial process. Henry
told how this new model greatly helps
scholarly work in fields particularly
impacted by the high costs and
distribution models of the printed book
such as art history. In this field, printing
costs are exceptionally high and as a
result many university presses have
reduced the number of art history titles,
severely limiting younger scholars’
prospects of publication.
Next, Maria S. Bonn and Alison
MacKeen described the University of
Michigan press which is exploring the
cutting edge, both in terms of the
content it publishes and how it
publishes. Their goal is to develop a
low-cost, scalable mechanism for
electronic publication and distribution
of journals, monographs and other
digital scholarly content. The University
of Michigan press formed a new
collaborative program between the
press, the library, and the Scholarly
Publishing Office, the UM Press’s new
Digital Culture imprint will both sell
books and offer the full-text of those
books freely on its Digital Culture
Books website.
The final speaker was Stephen
Rhind-Tutt, President of Alexander
Street Press, L.L. He began his
presentation with a description of the
blurring of the key activities and
skills of publishers and libraries. For
example, both groups actively create
self sustaining content packages and
services, commission new materials,
catalog and preserve content and
identify and ensure quality content.
Rhind-Tutt next provided a description
of the nature of electronic publications
which included terms like atomic,
interconnected, interdependent, pliable,
constantly evolving and without place.
In consider of the dynamic state of
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