In October 2016, I was privileged to attend a seminal event, The Transformation of Academic Library Collecting: A Symposium Inspired by Dan C. Hazen, along with colleagues Lorcan Dempsey and Constance Malpas who were speaking. This occasion brought together a group of eminent library leaders, research collections specialists and scholars at Norton’s Woods Conference Center in Cambridge, …
As we previously shared with you, we have been hard at work developing a research and learning agenda for special collections and archives. Here’s what has happened since Chela’s last post in May… Chela continued conversations with the advisory group and also with many others in the field. The goal has been to develop a …
We recently returned from attending the LIBER annual conference, held in Patras, Greece. LIBER is the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries and serves as an important professional organization for national and university libraries throughout Europe. We attended to talk with European research librarians and also to present preliminary …
Last month I and four OCLC colleagues—William Harvey, Rob Koopman, Shenghui Wang, and Jeff Young—participated in a “Visualizing Digital Humanities” workshop held at the Lorentz Center at the University of Leiden (photo at right). It brought together experts who had created “research datasets”, scholars, and visualization experts. Two of the four datasets were created by …
Now that I have your attention with that bizarre title, let me explain. Recently I gave a keynote talk at the IATUL Annual Conference in Bolzano, IT. Since I had an 11-hour flight to Frankfurt, I bought a neck pillow at the airport. One time I flew back from Australia in economy and it took …
At the two most recent American Library Association conferences, I’ve met with a small ad hoc group of librarians to discuss how we might measure and demonstrate the value that sharing our collections delivers to various stake holders: researchers, library administrators, parent organizations, service/content providers. First we described our current collection sharing environment and how …
In 2012, Sustainable Collection Services (SCS) and the Michigan Shared Print Initiative (MI-SPI) undertook one of the first shared print monographs projects in the US. Seven libraries came together under the auspices of Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS) to identify and retain 736,000 monograph holdings for an initial period of 15 years. This work …
Recently Ithaka S+R published an Issue Brief entitled “Finding a Way from the Margins to the Middle: Library Information Technology, Leadership, and Culture,” by Dale Askey and Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe. Their basic premise is that library information technology as an organizational unit has been pushed to the margins, and is not as centrally positioned within …
In 2007, OCLC Research and the Society of American Archivists convened the Digitization Matters meeting to explore barriers preventing institutions from scaling up digitization of special collections. At that time, the Google Books project and the Open Content Alliance had opened a floodgate of digitization of books in libraries, which caused us to ask, what …
Institutional research information management requires the engagement and partnership of numerous stakeholders within the university or research institution. A critical stakeholder group on any campus are institutional researchers, and I encourage greater collaboration between university libraries and institutional research professionals to support research information management. Last week I had the opportunity to present a poster at the annual meeting of …