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Digital Libraries Symposium VI: Requirements for the Future Digital Library
Karen Hunter, Elsevier, moderates
the sixth annual Digital Libraries
Symposium in Philadelphia. Panel
participants Ann Okerson, Clifford
Lynch, and Deanna Marcum
(not pictured) expressed their
visions of the future digital library.
The Sixth Annual Digital Libraries Symposium, sponsored by Elsevier in conjunction with the Midwinter American Library Association Conference, was held on January 25th in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Karen Hunter, Elsevier Senior Vice President, was again the organizer and moderator for the session, which attracted an overflow crowd of over 300 librarians, administrators, and vendors.
The guest panel included three leading voices from the library community. Deanna Marcum, President, Council on Library and Information Resources', Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian, Yale University and Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, all expressed their visions on the future of the digital library.
The first speaker, Deanna Marcum, centered her talk on the visionary question, "How do we realize the potential of digital libraries?" Marcum described her answer as simple, "We must build massive, comprehensive digital collections that scholars, students, and other researchers can use even more easily than they use the book-based collections that we have built up over the centuries."
This will not be easy, inexpensive, or without significant challenge, “but making much more content much more accessible is a great and worthy goal," she stated. "If we could make it possible for every student in America and throughout the world to access computers to use as doorways to the library world, that would be an achievement truly worthy of the ingenious technologies that are beginning to make it possible."
She stressed the need for strengthened and extended collaborations between librarians and publishers in order to achieve effective digital libraries, "re conceptualizing the roles of librarians and publishers, libraries could bring such things as digitizing experience, high-level metadata, delivery systems and large scale storage, while publishers could bring their expertise in marketing, pricing, and customer support."
"In building the future digital library, professional separation is only a burden to use all," she concluded.
Ann Okerson, the second speaker, centered her talk around "Asteroids, Moore's Law, and the Star Alliance" which raised immediate intrigue. Okerson first discussed several existing assumptions and "golden rules" that librarians brought with them from the print world to the digital environment which they still try to apply.
"I think those are asteroid rules, just like the golden rules of collections," Okerson stated referencing the title of her talk. "So some of our asteroids are a rapidly increasing amount of content; diverse formats in media, with electronic being the most recent, the most pervasive, the most powerful, and the most tantalizing; and a growing mandate for libraries of all sorts to collect across all of these media." In addition, users want increasing amounts of information outside the boundaries of anything they imagined to be in the library.
She described several institution-specific examples of new modes of collection development and the need for collaboration to realize the potential, rather like the Star Alliance, a reference to the airline partnership program, analagous to cooperation. “What can we learn from the Star Alliance?” she asked. “The Alliance is global in coverage-- that’s its intention. It is to be largely non-duplicative wherever possible and has a very high value to the customer.” She continued by describing the consortia of the future and its role in building digital libraries. Okerson closed by encouraging all to, “go boldly together where no libraries have gone before.”
The final speaker was Clifford Lynch who offered sketches of three areas of opportunity that he feels will advance the digital future. The first area addressed the question of changes in scholarly communication. "I think if we are really honest, if we look at how we have been making technology investments over the past 20 or 30 years, we have mostly been running around modernizing print-based publications," he said. "But, at some level, the basic concepts of authoring-of making arguments-of conveying information and conveying insight haven't changed yet very much in the digital world, but we can start seeing those changes happen."
His second set of opportunities focused on the understanding of digital libraries and digital collections. "I think we are starting to understand that digital collections and digital libraries are not co-terminus-they are not equivalent-that digital libraries are more than digital collections, they are software systems that are unpinned, in part, by digital collections."
Lynch's third area builds on the question of being very flexible and open-minded in our thinking about what is a digital library, where does its content come from, and what does it do? He described the digital universe being made up of personal information, organizational information, and public domain information, three areas that operate very independently at the moment but the prospect of integrating them creates an arena of opportunity. 
