ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


C&RL News ■ December 2002 /  789

C o l l e g e  & R e s e a r c h  L i b r a r i e s ens w

The knotty problem 
of priorities and relationships

A response to the top issues

by Shirley K. Baker

Ed. note: In  the N ovem ber2 00 2  issue, W. Lee 
Hisle p u tf orth the “Top issuesf a cing  academ ic li­
braries, ” which resultedf rom  the work o f the Focus 
on the FutureT ask Force. Thef ollowingi sa r esponse 
to the issues.

W h en  th e Focus o n  th e  Future Task Force 
discussed issue four—creation, control, and 
preservation of digital resources '—w e did not 
touch on w hat is a key issue surrounding digi­
tal resources on campus.

Cliff Lynch, at th e recen t ARL/SPARC/ 
CNI W orkshop on Institutional Repositories, 
called this our d irty  little secret. The secret is 
that th ere are m any digital creations o n  our 
campuses designed by faculty and managed with 
graduate students as amateur system adminis­
trators. These digital creations may not be scal­
able, secure, or appropriately accessible.

How do these creations come about? Often 
faculty have early discussions w ith librarians, 
hoping for assistance with digital projects. Too 
often, the faculty are put off by the com plex­
ity o f w hat the librarians propose. We u nder­
stand the standards that should be applied for 
long-term stability and accessibility. We know  
about useful software products for managing 
digital inform ation. But, w h en  the choice is 
working with the librarians on a complex prod­
uct or having a grad student w hip up a w ork­
able model in a short time, the second choice

often wins. There seem to be few cases where 
successful compromises have been reached and 
projects have gone forward w ith som e o f the 
speed desired by the faculty and som e of the 
structure required by the librarians.

Sometimes librarians have a second chance 
w h en  an im portant project w o n ’t scale u p  or 
w hen maintaining the digital material becomes 
too complex. Models being developed at insti­
tutions such as Cal Tech and MIT provide re­
positories for housing faculty digital projects 
and require minimal faculty effort. These re­
positories, of course, require significant upfront 
library effort to  create the capacity an d  the 
policies to accept, preserve, and provide ac­
cess to digital materials.

The answ er to our needs may com e from 
putting in that effort to create the repositories 
so that librarians can respond swiftly and yet 
according to  standards w h en  opportunities 
arise. And, the m ost effective efforts m ay be 
collaborations am ong institutions, w orking 
with partners or within consortia to maximize 
quality of result an d  m inim ize the effort put 
forth by any individual institution.

Note
1. See the N ovem ber 2002 issue of C&RL 

News for the article “Top issues facing academic 
libraries” or visit h ttp ://w w w .a la .o rg /a c rl/ 
hislenov02.html. ■

A bo ut the author

Shirley K. Baker is vice chancellor fo r inform ation technology and dean o f  University Libraries a t Washington 
University, e-mail: baker@library.wustl.edu

http://www.ala.org/acrl/
mailto:baker@library.wustl.edu