Press: “Research Librarians Consider the Risks and Rewards of Collaboration”

“Big-scale collaborations and digital-era collection strategies took center stage at the Association of Research Libraries’ membership meeting, held here last week. The library directors and others who attended heard about ambitious research and preservation projects like the HathiTrust digital repository and the proposed Digital Public Library of America, plans for which are moving ahead.

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“Charles J. Henry, the president of the Council on Library and Information Resources, gave a recap of the work that’s been done so far toward building the Digital Public Library of America. (On October 21, the National Archives will host a plenary meeting here about the proposed library.) ‘Library’ is a misnomer in this case, according to Mr. Henry. ‘The DPLA would be much more of a federation of existing objects. It wouldn’t own anything.’ Its big contribution, he said, would be to set standards and link resources. ‘It has to be a project that can respond to the most varied and disparate types of questions,’ he said. ‘The user has to drive this.’”

From Jennifer Howard’s article on The Chronicle of Higher Learning’s Wired Campus, Research Librarians Consider the Risks and Rewards of Collaboration