               Tennant: Digital Libraries
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Cutting Trail to a Destination UnknownOctober 2, 2007 The "Global Research Library 2020" meeting just concluded in Woodinville, WA. Sponsored by the University of Washington Libraries and Microsoft, it aimed to provide an action plan for research libraries to become more effective in an environment where research and scholarship is increasingly global. From my OCLC colleague Stu Weibel and computing guru Jon Udell you can pick up more full-featured coverage. From me, consider yourself lucky to get the high points.The rather ambitious goals of the meeting were perhaps too ambitious, but the end result is that this is merely the beginning of a much longer conversation that must occur. Our action items mostly revolved around how to move forward in a productive fashion while we puzzle out what it means to build global research libraries. A specific outcome is a small group of plucky volunteers who will work on an "aspirational manifesto" draft to which the rest of us can comment and contribute. To support this work Microsoft will set up a SharePoint site to support virtual collaboration. Also, the meeting itself will be documented and summarized on the web so the conversation can be opened across a much wider front. A core problem that we wrestled with, among many others, is that of research libraries collaborating on a global scale when we are funded and managed locally. Sure, there are ways to alleviate, avoid, and overcome this barrier, but most of these methods are easiest where money is not involved, such as aggregating content from institutional repositories. To be specific, how do we build a global research library to serve oceanography researchers without first solving the knotty issues of collaborative resource licensing, authentication and authorization across institutions, and a host of related issues? It isn't that these can't be solved, but it's quite clear they can't be solved in a two-day meeting despite the quality of the food and wine. If these were trivial problems we would have solved them already. We are cutting trail through a dense forest and although we have no idea where we may end up we know that getting through the forest is imperative. Welcome to our world. Posted by Roy Tennant on October 2, 2007 | Comments (0)
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