October 23, 2006 RLG Programs Partner Update
From Jim Michalko, VP Programs Development
Welcome to the new RLG Programs activity year. I want to
bring you up
to date on how far we've progressed since July on a variety of fronts,
introduce you to some new colleagues, and ask you to fill out some
forms and return them as soon as is convenient.
RLG Programs affiliation
& SHARES participation
Since July, with our new status, we have a new Partnership Agreement
Form—Continuing Partners that we need each partner to fill
out, sign, and return as quickly as you can. The form asks for the
designation of the partner representative along with all relevant
contact details—this will allow us to update our records and
confirm that we're in touch with the right person.
Those of you who expect to continue participating in RLG's resource
sharing program will need to fill out the SHARES
Annual Agreement Form
and designate this year's liaison. Please also print, sign, and return
this at your earliest convenience. Those of you who wish to join the
SHARES partnership for the first time should contact Dennis Massie (see
staff contact list at the end of this memo).
Instructions for returning the signed forms are included on each form.
Continuing & new
partners
I'm pleased to report that nearly all former RLG members have chosen to
join us in our new configuration as RLG Programs partners. To date,
over 95% of our pre-May institutional affiliates have made a positive
decision to continue their association with us. See our current listing
of partner
institutions.
Further, I'm delighted to report that, since May, four additional
institutions have joined us as partners. Please join me in welcoming
new partner representatives:
What we're doing
The work that was underway in July continues. Here are a few highlights
of what is happening:
- This year's RLG Forum was held in August at the
Folger Library. Attracting 125 staff from partner institutions. More,
Better, Cheaper, Faster addressed the question: "How
does one develop practical, effective, descriptive practices that
consider audience, economy, and functionality, and strike the right
balance among the three?" Presentations (texts, presentations, and mp3
files) can be found on our [[link to
/en/page.php?Page_ID=20968 summary
page]]. Positive feedback from participants in a
follow-up
survey is helping to shape planning for a 2007 forum.
- Planning for a [[link to
/en/page.php?Page_ID=20986
March 2007 symposium]]
in New York City was kicked off this month when 24 staff from 23
partner institutions convened at Columbia under the leadership of
Merrilee Proffitt and colleagues from both Programs and Research. The
future of discovery, delivery, and use was the central focus of a
lively and wide-ranging discussion. A second group will be invited to
take part in a discussion session in London in early December under the
leadership of Karen Smith-Yoshimura. Mark your calendars now for the
symposium—to be hosted by the New York Public Library on
March 15 and 16, 2007.
- SHARES librarians are working with Dennis Massie and
others to select new software for their interlending and document
supply activities (ILL Manager will cease to be supported in August
2007) and will be convening a series of regional meetings, the first of
which was held on October 20 at New York University.
- Günter Waibel is working with OCLC
Research's Jeff Young and the RLG Museum Sharing Working Group to
generate a museum-flavored version of OAICat—developed by
OCLC with modifications by colleagues at the Getty. The goal of this
activity is to lower the barrier for participation in sharing museum
descriptive information and digital surrogates for the entire museum
community. This will be a useful piece of open source software that
Günter would be happy to explain in more detail.
- Karen Smith-Yoshimura is working with colleagues to
prepare RLG partners for the 2007 transition for technical processing
users of the RLG Union Catalog. This has included a series of Web-based
Live Meeting sessions, new documents in our Web site, regional visits,
and large number of e-mail and telephone exchanges.
- Robin Dale's successful joint work with the Center
for Research Libraries on certification of trusted repositories is
drawing to a close and will be reported on elsewhere in the coming
weeks. Robin recently participated in two National Library of Australia
workshops related to preservation metadata (PREMIS) and trusted digital
repositories (RLG-NARA audit checklist) and also keynoted a day at the
University of Melbourne on trusted digital repositories.
- Anne Van Camp is working closely with colleagues on
two related projects. The first is the potential development of an
Archives Institutional Registry and the second is focused on an
initiative to explore possible ways to progress work around an emerging
archival standard, Encoded Archival Context. She and I met with
colleagues at NARA this month and discussed several areas of mutual
interest.
- At the end of the summer, Constance Malpas relocated
from New York to California, joining the RLG Programs team in Mountain
View. Constance has been pursuing a number of initiatives in
conjunction with RLG Programs and other OCLC colleagues, including a
series of efforts to characterize the issues that affect the community
as a result of global mass digitization programs. She will be
representing RLG Programs at the DLF Fall Forum in Boston next month.
- In July, Nancy Elkington moved from New York to Ohio
and is now working alongside new Research colleagues at OCLC
headquarters in Dublin. She was in touch with many of you over the past
few months by phone and e-mail as you transitioned from RLG member to
RLG Programs partner. She will be meeting with UK and Ireland partners
next month in a series of meetings and visits in London, Manchester,
Nottingham, and Birmingham.
- Ricky
Erway, Bruce Washburn, and Arnold Arcolio are splitting their time for
now between RLG Programs activities, transitioning RLG services, and
consulting with OCLC colleagues in a range of areas, including
WorldCat.org, digital collections development, and more.
- I've
been working with Lorcan and colleagues to develop our coodinated
agenda and logging miles traveling to Dublin, Ohio and places in
between. Last week, I meet with many of you at the Association of
Research Libraries fall membership meeting in Washington and joined in
the Reception Celebrating the Coming Together of OCLC and RLG.
Where we're headed
Program areas focus on issues of uncertainty and change for the
communities we serve. This means that they are key areas for shared
attention and collaborative action. They are important as a way of
identifying priorities and maximizing impact as we help libraries,
archives, and museums design their future. The following program areas
have been identified as important to RLG Partners and therefore also to
OCLC Programs and Research:
- Supporting
new modes of teaching and learning
- Managing
the collective collection
- Renovating
descriptive and organizing practices
- Modeling
new service infrastructures
- Architecture
and standards
- Measurement
and behaviors
The
overall aim is to enhance the ways libraries, archives, and museums
create value in the research and learning process. This makes it
important to directly engage with and support new forms of research,
teaching, and learning. Our first area focuses on this topic.
The next three areas embody professional means by which libraries,
archives, and museums create that value. In each case, they are
reengineering structures and practices to better support networked
environments, support new behaviors, and introduce efficiencies. Major
areas of attention here are managing aggregate or collective
collections, evolving descriptive practices, and new service
frameworks.
The final two are about assuring maximum reach of that created value
through interoperability based on architecture and standards, and
improvement based on measurement and observation.
All these overlap and connect in multiple ways; a forthcoming
(December) document will amplify these connections and also itemize
some specific activities that we will be undertaking in the coming
months.
Consultations on the agenda are taking place this month with the RLG
Committee (a standing committee of the OCLC Board of Trustees) and with
the RLG Program Council (and advisory body that will meet for the first
time in Chicago on October 27). By early December, we expect to have a
well-shaped work agenda that can be shared widely with partners. I
encourage you to stay in touch with your colleagues on the Program
Council—in future years, this group will be a body elected by
RLG Programs partner representatives.
Members of the RLG Committee
of the OCLC Board of Trustees
James Neal, chair (Columbia University)
Nancy Eaton (Pennsylvania State University)
Carol Mandel (New York University)
Lizabeth Wilson (University of Washington)
Jane Ryland (Educause)
Elisabeth Niggemann (Die Deutsche Bibliothek)
Members of the RLG Program
Council
Shirley Baker (Washington University in St Louis)
Nancy Eaton (Pennsylvania State University)
Kenneth Hamma (J. Paul Getty Trust)
Tony Hey (Microsoft)
Wendy Pradt Lougee (University of Minnesota)
Clifford A. Lynch (Coaltion for Networked Information)
Carol Mandel (New York University)
James Neal (Columbia University)
Chris Rusbridge (Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh)
Gary Strong (University of California, Los Angeles)
Lizabeth Wilson (University of Washington)
David Zeidberg (Huntington Library)
Where we'll be in October
& November
Want to talk, catch up, ask a question, or make a suggestion? RLG
Programs staff will be covering a good bit of ground in the next few
months—here's where you might bump into us:
- October
19-20: Digital Archive Technologies Conference—Creating
Research Resources, Taipai, Taiwan—Günter Waibel
- October
20: [[link to /en/page.php?Page_ID=20993 SHARES Meeting]],
New York, NY—Dennis Massie
- October
20: Open Content Alliance Workshop, San Francisco, CA—Ricky
Erway
- October
29-30: OCLC Members Council, Dublin, OH—Jim Michalko, Nancy
Elkington
- November
8, 2006: [[link to /en/page.php?Page_ID=20988 RLG
Programs Colloquium]], London, UK—Nancy
Elkington
- November
8-10: [[link to /en/page.php?Page_ID=20989 Digital
Library Federation Fall Forum]], Boston,
MA—Constance
Malpas
- November
8-11: [[link to /en/page.php?Page_ID=20981 Museum
Computer Network Annual Conference, Pasadena,
CA—Günter Waibel]]
- November
17: Collaborative Linking: Libraries, Museums, and Archives, Keio
University, Tokyo, Japan—Jim Michalko
- November
18: [[link to /en/page.php?Page_ID=20980RLG-OCLC
Transition Forum—Middle East Librarians Association]],
Boston, MA—Karen Smith-Yoshimura
Stay in touch with RLG
Programs staff
Many of the staff
you've worked with for years are now part of RLG Programs. We
closed the New York office this summer; Constance moved to California,
joining us in our Mountain View office, while Nancy moved to Dublin,
Ohio and now has an office in the OCLC Programs and Research offices.
RLG Programs staff reached to most of you in the last few months and
will continue to do so, but if you would like to get in touch with us,
please do so at your convenience:
Arnold Arcolio, arnold_arcolio@oclc.org
Anne Van Camp, anne_vancamp@oclc.org
Robin Dale, robin_dale@oclc.org
Nancy Elkington, nancy_elkington@oclc.org
Ricky Erway, ricky_erway@oclc.org
Constance Malpas, constance_malpas@oclc.org
Dennis Massie, dennis_massie@oclc.org
Merrilee Proffitt, merrilee_proffitt@oclc.org
Karen Smith-Yoshimura, karen_smith-yoshimura@oclc.org
Günter Waibel, guenter_waibel@oclc.org
Bruce Washburn, bruce_washburn@oclc.org
In closing, I want to thank all of you for your continuing support and
attentive interest through this stimulating period of change. We are
committed to developing a work agenda that meets your needs and those
of the community at large. Expect to hear from me again in December and
don't hesitate to get in touch before then.
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