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Association of Research Libraries
Collections & Access for the 21st Century Scholar: A Forum to Explore the Roles of the Research Library |
Introduction to Lou Pitschmann
Sarah Pritchard, University of California-Santa Barbara
Richard Lucier has given us a cogent assessment of the shifting definitions for collections and services in libraries and in the broader scholarly environment. Much of the rest of this forum will look at various strategies and conceptual approaches for managing electronic content and access in this environment. There are many ways to grapple with this, most of which we seem to be trying all at once.
Recently, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has issued a set of three linked publications sponsored by the Digital Library Federation addressing aspects of developing digital collections. One focused on managing commercially provided content; one on in-house digitizing of unique and special resources; and the third on the creation of customized links, catalogs or guides to navigate existing content on the public or "free" web. This last area may represent the oldest urge of librarians - to index and classify. We've been doing this since the 17th century or earlier depending on how one defines it. Thus it is no surprise that we took this approach to the Internet almost from the beginning, if you remember all those early Gopher menus. And yet, have we really examined the effectiveness of this last approach, which we are doing over and over and over again across similar content at all our institutions? How well does it really help library users, and is it sustainable?
Our next presenter has really examined these issues. Louis Pitschmann, now Dean of Libraries at the University of Alabama, was the associate director for collection development and management at the University of Wisconsin when he undertook the study published by the DLF as "Building Sustainable Collections of Free Third-Party Web Resources." Lou will share key insights from his research.
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Collections & Access for the 21st Century Scholar Forum
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ARL Forum on Collections and Access
Friday, October 19, 2001
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