Boston, Massachusetts
May 17-19, 1995
Deanna Marcum, President
Commission on Preservation and Access
Council on Library Resources
I am very pleased to be here today. I appreciate this opportunity to tell you a little bit more about the National Digital Library Federation.
I want to tell you a little bit about how this evolved, and then I want to invite all of you to become part of this effort. When the Commission on Preservation and Access gave contracts to a few institutions to work on digital projects, they began to talk about the implications of digital technology on the full range of library operations and services, and they began to speculate on what they needed to do to take those implications into account in the future. They began meeting as a small informal group. They called themselves the La Guardia 6, and then it became the La Guardia 8, and then it became the Digital Preservation Consortium. While all of these informal meetings were taking place, the Library of Congress announced its plan to work on a digital library initiative, as well.
Stuart Lynn was then the interim President of the Commission, and he very wisely talked about inviting the Library of Congress to join the group, which, in fact, it did. As these individuals began talking about what it meant to work collaboratively, because no one institution would be able to do any of these things alone, they wanted very much to put in writing what it meant for libraries to work together on the notion of a national digital library. To their credit, I think they were very successful in producing a document that explained what it would mean for groups of people to come together and figure out what a national digital library is, what it means to contribute something to it, and, most of all, what conditions have to be in place to make sure that whatever is digitized will be available to everyone.
It was in that spirit that the document was created, and the title, “National Digital Library Federation,” was coined, because the intent is to make sure all the participants’ contributions lead to the whole. This was a first attempt to begin to put something in a more cohesive form. Fifteen institutions are now part of this. We are very interested, though, in making sure all libraries that wish to be part of this effort have a chance to do so.
We do not have any kind of structure yet. We simply have an identification of people who have agreed to work together to come up with these definitions, and I invite any ARL member who would like to be part of the Federation to please let me know. We will then need to come up with documents people can look at, react to, and take back to their institutions to talk about with everyone there. We will need to come up with two structures, one that will be a kind of policy group, people who will talk about the principles that need to be considered in building a national digital library; and then task forces to work on specific topics and then report back to the larger group.
What the Commission has done is try to provide a meeting place. We have nothing to digitize, no library to worry about. What we think we can do is bring people into the same room and make sure the discussion goes forward. So really what I wanted to do today is invite you to let us know if you are interested in being part of this. Certainly we will be keeping everyone informed, and I hope by the end of the summer we will have documents available for comment.