I found an interesting report today and thought I’d share a link to it for readers interested in how we might continue to refactor the work of librarianship. I spent the last 18 months or so on a digression into issues surrounding digital archiving and institutional repositories and now I’m beginning to think about another area where the library has a contribution to make and an opportunity to develop new expertise–digital data collections. The report, Long-Lived Digital Data Collections: Enabling Research and Education in the 21st Century, was published in September 2005 by the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation and runs about 85 pages (no comment on the fact that you have to reach page 23 before the word library appears).
I think it can be argued that is easier to convince others that an IR service belongs in the library–after all, it’s just an updated version of what we’ve been doing for years. Inertia might suggest that something like a “digital data collections center” will require an entirely new entity on campus—but I think the “long-lived” in the title certainly gives us an opening.