2009 Fall Digital Library Federation Forum

The most recent DLF Forum occurred November 11-12 in Long Beach, CA. As others have observed, this Forum represented a departure from previous Forums. Roy Tennant, a member of the planning committee, described the Forum through one of his blog posts. Roy was one of the members of an extraordinary planning committee that demonstrated professionalism of the highest order. It was an honor for me to work with this planning group.

The Forum came at a time of transition for DLF specifically and libraries more generally. Libraries continue to grapple with budget cuts, some of which seem quite severe, that include travel restrictions or embargoes resulting in fewer attendees than previous Forums. For these reasons, the planning committee and CLIR adopted a different approach for this Forum. The theme was "Strategies for Innovation" with a subtheme of "Getting Results." The Forum provided an opportunity for reflection on lessons learned and consideration of strategies for moving forward.

Perhaps what struck me the most about this Forum was the passion, energy, and thoughtful dialogue of every participant. I can honestly say I've never attended a meeting or forum where everyone was so focused and engaged over two days without digressing into what could have been many pathways for chaos. It was a daunting challenge to organize and implement such a Forum and our community rose to this challenge. In addition to the people in the room, there was an extremely rich "back channel" conversation through Second Life and Twitter. On several occasions, the Forum participants in the room found ourselves responding to comments from our colleagues who participated from afar.

While there were many worthwhile observations, we tried to encapsulate the overarching ideas through the following principles:

• Libraries must transform themselves to better support the mission of our institutions
• Innovation is an essential component for transformation
• Innovation comes in many varieties
• Successful innovation can not happen without effective people, processes, practices and technologies

This last point is one that has continued to bounce around my head since the Forum. I worry a great deal that libraries do not have "industrial strength" capabilities in terms of people, processes, practices and technologies. I have no doubt regarding our service orientation and commitment, but I believe we have a long way to go in terms of developing infrastructure -- both people and technology -- that can meet the needs of our scholars.

Perhaps this is something the to be hired DLF Program Officer will think about.

DLF Spring Forum 2009

In early May, I attended the Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2009. Attendance was extremely low, compared to previous DLF Forums that I've attended. The atmosphere was somewhat somber, as DLF prepares to relinquish its independent status and return to the CLIR fold. Chuck Henry, the President of CLIR, talked about this during his opening remarks. CLIR is currently committed to continuing the two meetings per year format used by DLF. He also talked about expanding the mission into new domains, mentioning specificlly that CLIR is exploring relationships between spy agencies and humanists through its research programs.

Clay Redding gave a very interesting presentation describing how the Library of Congress is building linked data services for authorities and controlled vocabularies. The first data to be made available through this mechanism is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The idea behind the linked data approach is to provide information that can be acted on by both humans and machines. This is done by creating identifiers for each term and using a consistent knowledge representation to describe it. Additionally, each collection and concept has its own URI, making it a resource. These resources can be related to other URIs or terms using RDF. With this framework in place, existing semantic web tools can be brought to bear, including inferencing and visualization. While LCSH is first out of the gate, LC plans to release many more resources using this approach.

David Ruddy of Cornell also gave a talk about a novel approach to linking resources using OpenURL. The approach employed both institutional- and domain-based OpenURL resolvers, with the idea that the domain-specific resolvers could fill in needed data before passing requests on to the institutional resolvers. While still fairly adherent to the OpenURL 0.1 approach, it is heartening to see work like this that starts to move us toward a more sophisticated approach. I would like to see more applications take fuller advantage of the 2004 NISO OpenURL framework, as has the Djatoka service being developed at LANL and presented at Open Repositories 2009 by Ryan Chute.

Spring 2009 Digital Library Federation Forum

Since I arrived at the DLF Forum late Tuesday evening, I wasn't really able to attend much of the Forum itself. In addition to noting that David really likes barbecue, I mainly noted the reactions to the DLF merger with CLIR. There is widespread understanding that the current economic climate is having a signficant impact. The number of attendees at this year's Forum was notably lower. Everyone I spoke with agreed that the DLF Forums are a valuable and worthwhile experience. There is an obvious self-selection bias in this case, but it's worth stressing the value of the community that gathers during these forums. Additionally, DLF Forums have been an important venue for launching and nurturing new initiatives and communities. The Project Managers' preconference is the most recent example of a self-organized, motivated group of colleagues who have now found kindred spirits. Sometimes there's no substitute for realizing that others are facing--even struggling--with the same challenges. This type of engagement is critical for our community, especially toward building shared capacity.

I heard about one case of an institution which is a member of DLF, but not a member of CLIR. There are undoubtedly implementation details that need to be resolved with the recent merger. But it was clear to me that they should be because DLF Forums represent an important component of our community's fabric.