The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), US, has announced the release of a new volume that examines challenges associated with the transition of research collections from an analogue to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation and reconstitution. The volume, The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship, comprises three reports offering perspectives on this transition from librarians, economists and scholarly users.
Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry of Rice University have authored the first report, 'Can a New Research Library Be All-Digital?' Most established research libraries would face serious challenges in moving toward largely digital collections - one major concern is how to manage the print legacy that has long been a key metric of a library's value to scholars. The authors consider this and other obstacles to realising a virtual library, and then profile seven recently established academic libraries. On the basis of their findings, they offer recommendations for startup libraries, as well as suggestions for additional research.
The volume's second report, 'On the Cost of Keeping a Book,' examines the economics of storing and providing access to print volumes and provides a preliminary comparison with the cost of keeping e-books. Economist and University of Michigan Library Director Paul Courant and coauthor Matthew "Buzzy" Nielsen, assistant director of the North Bend Public Library in Oregon, conclude that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries.
The proportion of digital information used and created on campus continues to grow, and is indeed changing how scholars in many disciplines do their work. Large-scale text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitisation efforts offer great potential for supporting new forms of scholarship, but how well are these text corpora meeting scholarly needs? What are the implications of these projects for teaching, research, and publishing? These questions are addressed in the volume's final report, 'Ghostlier Demarcations,' based on commissioned research and subsequent discussions involving scholars in the humanities. A web-based adjunct to the report provides detailed findings of investigations conducted against large-scale digital text data sets by scholars in four disciplines.
In a concluding chapter, Roger Schonfeld of ITHAKA S&R observes the tension that research libraries face between fulfilling their time-honored role as custodians of scholarship and enabling a digital environment for scholars. He notes the growing potential for system-wide responses to mitigate this tension. CLIR President Charles Henry echoes this idea in an epilogue that summarises the results of a recent study on the feasibility of a cloud library and its recommendations for large-scale, coordinated solutions to print and digital storage.
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