The Library's stance toward departments has generally been that our responsibilities are to provide information resources to support (a) teaching and (b) research, and generally to be sensitive to faculty interests in 'developing the collection'. In the past this meant handling the day-to-day chores of maintaining monographic and periodical resources; in the last 5 years, more and more of the Library's time and budget has gone into digital information, in the form of electronic journals and support of online indexes. We can anticipate that over the next 5 years print-journal resources will continue to be duplicated by and in many cases replaced entirely by online access. We can also expect that faculty will become creators of more and more digital information, and anticipate that they will want the Library to take some level of responsibility for collecting, curating, and distributing such digital assets: we see the beginnings of this in digital image projects (the Bent and Connors projects) and digital library experiments (the Digital South and several Special Collections projects). We can also anticipate that more faculty will wish to use digital assets of various sorts in their teaching, and that their needs for support will grow. MIT's DSpace is a prominent example of this phenomenon of digital library development.
We are quite unprepared to cope with these emergent demands, in terms of staff time, developed skills, network resources, and organization. The ad hoc approaches and interest-driven experiments that have characterized our progress to date are not sustainable, and are inadequate to support continued exploration: our successes in the prototype and development phases of projects have created demands for 'production' that strain our resources.
Our understanding of how people (students, faculty, staff) actually use information is poorly developed and uneven, and consequently our planning for future uses is reliant on an uncomfortably vague combination of pious hopes, extrapolation of past trends, and what we think we discern in peer institutions. What we lack is, on the one hand, empirical data on what our users actually do, and on the other, any proactive institutional strategy to create information resources for the future.
It seems clear that the Library and ITG should be allies in defining and developing strategies and procedures to augment digital content for teaching and learning, but those of us who have been experimenters and visionaries on these frontiers generally feel that support for our efforts has been lukewarm and disengaged. How could this be changed? What resources do we need, and how can we gain access to them?