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ARL Strategic Design Meeting Convenes at GWU

gwu-gelman-lib-entrance-floor
image © GWU

ARL’s strategic thinking and design process continues to make headway. Martha Kyrillidou reports on the regional design meeting hosted by the George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, DC, in December 2013. She notes the Washingtonian nature of this group of participants, including staff from “federal library and archival agencies—such as the Smithsonian Libraries, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and National Institutes of Health (NIH)—as well as the DC Public Library, Montgomery College Libraries, and the libraries of such universities as GWU, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, University of Maryland, and University of Virginia.” She observes:

It seemed especially fitting that this meeting took place in DC, since this city is also the setting for Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, the making of which used world-building techniques that are similar to the methods used in this strategic process, particularly imagining a reality that is far into the future and yet still plausible…The ARL meeting participants spent the day creating a future reality for research libraries, much as the makers of Minority Report created a future reality for DC.

ARL staff are reporting on selected meetings as they happen.


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

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