Washington, D.C.
October 18-20, 1995

Building Partnerships that Shape the Future

Program Session III: Introduction

Convened by Dale Canelas, Director
University of Florida Libraries

I would like to welcome you all to Program Session III, “Realizing Benefits from Inter-Institutional Agreements.”

In the first two sessions we examined what kind of cooperative strategies exist for shaping the future of scholarly communication. In this session we will discuss the barriers to achieving the desired economic benefits of coordinated collection management.

We hope to generate some discussion about the expectation that these agreements offer economic advantages and improved performance. We know that there is a good deal of skepticism about whether these agreements actually lead to cost savings, and some say that cost containment is the best that we can hope for.

The two presenters for this session have agreed to synthesize the findings of two recent projects, the CPA/RLG Task Force on Archiving Digital Materials and the AAU/ARL Latin Americanist project.

The AAU/ARL Latin Americanist Research Resources project aims to broaden the array of Latin American resources currently available to students and to scholars, to restructure the access to these collections on a comprehensive scale, and to assist libraries in containing the costs. The first phase of the project is a cooperative effort focusing on three categories of resources in Mexico and Argentina: serials, government documents, and non-governmental publications.

Our first speaker, Peter Lyman, University Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, has agreed to discuss the implications of the White Paper on Intellectual Property, which serves as a constraint on institutional sharing, and, using the experience of the 32 libraries participating in the Latin Americanist project as an example, he will point to some of the ways in which library cooperation differs between public and private institutions. Finally, he will point out some promising ideas in current management literature to help us conceptualize institutional interdependencies.

Until 1994, when he accepted his present position, Peter was the University Librarian at the University of Southern California, where he founded the Center for Scholarly Technology, a program for research and development of software for instruction and research.

He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Berkeley and Stanford, respectively.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors for Educom, the Council on Library Resources, and the Research Libraries Group. He is a trustee of the Babbage Foundation and serves on advisory boards for the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Getty Art History Information Project.

We will then hear from Donald Waters, Associate University Librarian at Yale University, who will acquaint you with the project and share the experiences of the Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Materials. The Task Force is a joint venture of the Commission for Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group, and their charge is to frame the issues that need to be resolved for technology to be considered an acceptable approach for ensuring indefinite and continued access to electronic digital records. Recently they distributed the first draft of their report for comment. Of particular interest is the Task Force’s finding that the challenges of reaping economic benefits from digital archiving are not technical, but are instead organizational.

Don is Co-Chair of the Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Materials, along with John Garrett of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Don is an anthropologist by training, with a doctorate from Yale University. He joined the Yale University Library in 1987 as head of the Systems Office, after holding positions in the Yale School of Management and the Computer Center. His current responsibilities include oversight of Library Technical Services, of the Science and Social Science Libraries, and of Library Systems.

Please join me in welcoming Peter Lyman and Don Waters to our program.