EDUCAUSE Review Articles and Digital Collections

Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. By building bridges among various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation.

The author discusses the various cultural treasures which make up part of the scholarly evidence and cultural history that is to be digitized over the coming decades.

Educational institutions should be actively rethinking how they are accessing and using copyrighted visual arts images, and they should be exploring an approach that seeks to address copyright owners’ interests, as well as users’ needs, in an environment that encourages increased, shared access to these images for teaching and study.

The authors discuss recent studies conducted to gage the academic librarian's and faculty member's view on the increasing use and offering of electronic resources. One could conclude from the studies that the "transition to an electronic environment poses significant strategic and management challenges for higher education" and that there is a "need for libraries to take leadership in helping academia's transition to the new environment".

The author discusses the delicate balance of creating collaborative relationships between faculty, librarians and IT staff. One such Fellowship effort is sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). In attracting recent Ph.D.s who believe that there are opportunities to develop meaningful linkages between disciplinary scholarship, libraries, archives, and evolving digital tools, the program brings scholars with both teaching and digital experience into the academic library so that they may serve as a bridge between librarians, faculty, and IT professionals.

Making knowledge services work in higher education will depend on developments in technology and also on a variety of commitments—academic, institutional, commercial, and public policy—undertaken by a small cadre of innovative institutions and leaders.

"Tremendously exciting large-scale digitization projects are opening up cultural memory as embodied in our library special collections, our museums and archives, and the public-domain segment of our published literature to unprecedented levels of access and use."

Six evolving technologies made news in 2004: spam, legal P2Ps, learning objects, content convergence, nomadicty, and regional networks.

The author discusses whether new digital formats of scholarly research should and will be considered valid scholarly communication by the higher education community.