Boston, Massachusetts
May 17-19, 1995
Jerry D. Campbell, Presiding President ARL
MR. CAMPBELL: Good morning. I declare this meeting in session. We have three new directors since our fall membership meeting, several of whom are familiar faces from their acting positions. They are Pamela Andre, National Agricultural Library (NAL); Eileen Hitchingham, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University; and Frank Winter, University of Saskatchewan. We have asked some of their colleagues to introduce them to us.
Pamela will be welcomed and introduced by Nancy Eaton, Eileen will be welcomed and introduced by Jim Myers, and Frank will be welcomed and introduced by Paul Wiens.
MS. EATON (Iowa State): It is a great pleasure for me to introduce Pam to you. I have had the pleasure of working with Pam on many of the Land Grant Initiatives, including the Text Digitizing Project.
Pam came to NAL from the Library of Congress in 1984. Prior to 1984 she held a number of positions. She was a Systems Analyst, Assistant Chief of the Market Editorial Division, and was involved with their original Opera List pilot project. She was then recruited by Joe Howard to be the Associate Director for Automation at NAL, then became Acting Director, and was named permanent Director in November of 1994.
Pam is also very active internationally. She is very involved in the International Association of Agriculture, particularly in the Baltic area; and has been a consultant for Egypt in the start-up of their National Agricultural Library. So for those of you with international interests, you have a good colleague in that realm, as well. Please join me in welcoming Pam.
MR. MYERS (Temple University): Eileen is the new Dean of Libraries at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (VPI). Eileen and I worked together as very young librarians at Oakland University, where she was the Science and Engineering Librarian, and then head of Reference, Associate Dean for Public Services, and Automation Coordinator.
Eileen has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemistry from Chestnut Hill College, an MA from Western Michigan University, and her Ph.D. from Wayne State.
She has also worked at the Harvard Medical School libraries, where she was a medullas analyst. She has been Dean of Libraries at the University of Idaho and at Drexel. She has published, spoken, and consulted widely on electronic services, library research design, and library buildings, and she is truly a wonderful colleague. I know you will all join me in welcoming her.
MR. WIENS (Queens University): Good morning. I am very pleased to introduce Frank Winter, the new Director of Libraries at the University of Saskatchewan. I think Frank is already well known to some of you, particularly our Canadian colleagues, and he and I have been working together in the Portage la Prairie Pacific University Libraries and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries for a number of years now.
Frank began his career at the University of Windsor Law Library. He then came to the University of Saskatchewan, first as Personnel Librarian, and then as Associate Librarian in charge of technical services and systems. It was as Associate Librarian that I first met Frank, in 1986, and over the succeeding five years we developed a very strong and productive working relationship. I also developed a tremendous regard for Frank’s very considerable, not to mention familial, skills and abilities, particularly in the areas of planning, analysis, and organization. He has a prodigious capacity for work and getting things done, and has set a standard that has been impossible for any associate librarian to meet.
UMS owes to Frank its reputation for their creative, cost-effective use of information technologies, an area in which he has a special interest, as he does for information policy. Furthermore, in 1990, the UMS won the first Innovative Achievement Award given by the Canadian Association of College and University Libraries for a project Frank had put together, Info Access.
Frank is currently the President of Canadian Association of College and University Libraries, and I am sure that he will make a very strong contribution in ARL, as he has already done on the Canadian National Library scene. I ask you to join me in welcoming Frank Winter.
MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you very much. We welcome each of you and look forward to working with you in the future. We also have several acting and interim directors, as well as members from other libraries with us, and we welcome you and hope you find these meetings interesting and useful.
Other guests I would like to acknowledge are Doug Bennett, the Vice President of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Representing the Association of American University Presses is Brian Wilcox, Director of the University of Massachusetts Press.
Representing the Association of American Universities (AAU) is John Vaughn, Senior Officer.
Representing the National Endowment for the Humanities is George Farr, and Richard Ekman is here representing The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
We thank you, everybody, for taking the time from your busy schedules to be here with us.
Welcome to Boston and the 126th meeting of ARL. We are gathered this week to examine the changes taking place in libraries throughout the world as they come to grips with the new technologies being developed in order to revolutionize the dissemination of information and the establishment of the electronic library environment.
This new technology really grabs us, but then it is pretty hard to pin it down and make anything of it. Realizing the digital library is perhaps the biggest challenge facing our library community today.
Some of the key factors for success have already been identified, such as cooperative collection-building agreements and digitization projects; reliable, speedy, convenient, and cost-effective delivery; collaborative ventures with the publishing sector; and protection for the rights of both the users and the owners of proprietary works in an electronic environment.
These are just some of the issues that need to be further developed in order for us to reach our goal. But a more solid framework is needed to advance this agenda, one that will avoid redundancy and secure the necessary support for these projects.
The first session today is organized to provide both a vision for the future and a historical context on which that vision will be based. In other words, we will ask where we’re going, where we’ve been, and what we’ve learned.
The second session is structured around discussions of what collaborative strategies the research library community must develop in order to be successful in the emerging digital environment.
At lunch we will examine three national collaborative initiatives designed to build electronic libraries for the future, and after lunch we will showcase electronic libraries that are presently operational.
We will examine the principles that define the success of the transition to an electronic environment. We will then have an opportunity to hold very important political discussions regarding access to government information in an electronic age and to identify the implications of the changes in copyright taking place in the new environment.
At this point I would like to begin the opening session. This session is intended to lay the foundation upon which the rest of the meeting will follow. The purpose of this meeting is to define commonly held goals and identify how ARL can best serve you in achieving these goals. I urge you to think about how we can engage these issues as a community and to help us identify cooperative strategies to guide in the realization of digital libraries.
Our distinguished panelists will offer insights into the developments that are shaping the horizon upon which academic and research libraries must operate.
John Gage, our first speaker, is here to offer insights into the developments that will shape the technological environment in which libraries must operate. John is Director of the Science Office at Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation, and is responsible for Sun’s relationship with scientific and public policy communities worldwide.