Toward A Shared Understanding Of Digital Management

(Via RLG Shelflife)

An ad hoc group of digital librarians, system developers and publishers meeting under the aegis of the Digital Library Federation has created a checklist of things that operators of digital content repositories can do to help simplify the interoperation of their collections and systems. American institutions of higher education today are awash with digital information resources, including thousands of electronic books and journals; hundreds of digital reference works; increasingly rich collections of digital pictures, videos and music; and large databases of survey, geographic and scientific data. Few areas of academic work are not dependent on at least some digital resources at this point, and the range and importance of what is available continues to grow dramatically. All of which points to a critical need for libraries to have systems that simplifies management of and access to this enormous digital pool. The group focused its suggestions on three areas: gathering information, creating resources and sharing content. Key to the effort is the need for the various communities -- librarians, course management developers and commercial information providers -- to work together. "We found that the various communities did not have a shared understanding of the larger environment, and that we had a great deal to learn from each others world views," wrote the report's authors. "It is not easy to identify how to hold such larger discussions, but we believe an effort in this direction would provide significant pay-back."

Digital Library Federation (Jul 2004)

Posted by Tom on December 16, 2004