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

Building Partnerships that Shape the Future

Question and Answer Session

MS. CANELAS: I would like to have a bit of discussion on this. Both the Bowen paper that you heard this morning and the Task Report on the Archiving of Digital Materials are available on the ARL web page at http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/index.html, under the Proceedings menu.

I think that these provocative presentations provide us with a really interesting context for exchange, and we are hoping to get your sense of the issues, what it is you think about collaborative strategies, where you think the cost savings might be, and where possible and potential problems may lie.

MR. NEAL (Johns Hopkins University): I have two quick points and then a question for Don. First, you spoke of the “embalming” role of libraries, but the image that came to my mind as I looked through the Task Force’s process and report was more one of cryogenics and being, able to refresh for future access to the information.

The second point is that the archive and library communities owe you a real round of applause for the extraordinary leadership, intelligence, and organizational skills you brought to our process.

My question is, I know that the Task Force began by looking at information that was initially produced digitally, but over time it began to expand its vision to embrace information that was converted from analog to digital formats. Would you reflect a bit on the dynamics of that shift in thinking and how it affects the organizational economic models to which you referred?

DR. WATERS: I’m not sure that the Task Force really has changed its approach there. I think the focus still is on maintenance of information in digital form, however it got there. I think our real sense, initially, was that we weren’t going to undertake discussions of how to get information into digital form, and that was retained in the final report.

One area that we used for cost information was an area where, particularly at Yale, we had converted information and so now have a repository, and we wanted to use the information that we had there to try to generate some information about cost. The cost information isn’t perfect. It doesn’t apply to all the kinds of information that one might want to apply it to, and so we need more focused cost information in areas where information has not yet been converted.

MS. TAYLOR (Brown University): I would like to comment on the issue of archiving hardware and software; this is an area where I believe partnership will be needed, both in terms of physical location, that is, a sort of agreement as to who will do what, but also in an effort to archive human expertise. For example, we have an interesting situation at my own institution. Brown University has the archives for the Institute for Research and Informational Scholarship (IRIS), which, in its day, was quite groundbreaking in the multimedia and hypertext fields.

In order to take their archives, we had to use a very antique work station, which is now the only work station upon which some of the software will run. It is sitting down in the university archives, but I don’t think anyone on the staff knows how to make it perform. So somehow we need to find ways to save the expertise of how to even work with outdated software and hardware.

MR. SHAUGHNESSY (University of Minnesota): Peter, I was taken with your comments on your discussions with Stanford and the criteria for such a collaboration. It happens that Wisconsin and Minnesota are involved in discussions that you might call merger discussions. The two of us really believe that our future survival as research libraries depends on much closer collaboration. In fact, collaboration isn’t even the word; it gets more and more to be like a merger.

The other day a group of us were down visiting Ken Frazier and his colleagues at Wisconsin, and he pointed out that if we were just to combine our acquisitions budgets, our combined budgets would exceed Harvard’s.

This is the kind of direction we will have to go in more and more often to build a relationship that goes far beyond anything we have ever talked about before. Some of us are convinced that that is what we have to do, and it isn’t just limited to the libraries, but encompasses entire universities.

MS. CANELAS: Thank you. This session is adjourned.