DLF’s Aquifer Project has received new funding from the Mellon Foundation! Congratulations to everyone who has worked so hard on this project! (A project web status page will be developed in the next few weeks).

I get asked about Aquifer all the time, understandably, and because the issues are complex, I usually try to pass off with a good-natured “It’s great!” Which rarely works, of course. In truth (and in sum), I think Aquifer is one of the best tickets that libraries have to help obtain the collaborative experience and skills they desperately need to find new good purposes, and that may be the single most important aspect it possesses.

Significant inter-library and inter-university cooperation is really hard without additional external supports, and I think part of the re-invention of libraries has to address that. Finding appropriate models, and aims, for that collaboration is a huge challenge that we are just beginning to undertake on a community basis, and Aquifer is an early and shallow scratch in the dirt of this larger problem.

All of us know (in libraries) that it is no longer about "digital" libraries any more. We are talking about the whole library, and the name of my organization - "Digital Library Federation" - is a misnomer. A library cannot grapple only with digital; it must address its entire existing work flow, its assumptions, its role, its unique character, and how it works - at what levels and with what aims - with others.

I think one of the harder and longer-term questions is what types of organizations are most effective for libraries to get their work accomplished. OCLC/RLG, a close fraternal organization, and DLF will be increasingly working together because we can complement each other's strengths. But as a group, libraries need to think about why and how it is that OCLC can be effective: specifically, they pool (and shape) individual interests into a community statement, and they can build services directly through their own internal organization. DLF, which is in less of a position to do that because of our diminuitive staff size (2), must be more advocacy based, "start-up" oriented, and so forth. It must be more on the edge of future, and seeking investment areas of high potential leverage, recognizing that some of its efforts will fail. Aside from 1-2 aquifers, it is not, as we all recognize, in a position to drive deep, long collaborations itself; the administrative overhead is simply too high. DLF’s mission must be to encourage various forms of exploration -- to rush toward failure (and hopefully an intermittant, rewarding success).

Through the experiences we shall be gaining, and to achieve the aims that we must pursue, North American research libraries need to determine if we must create a wholly different kind of virtual organization, perhaps based on, or an enlargement of, OCLC/RLG, that actually enacts a large portion of the common interests of libraries, in addition to a DLF that is a little bit more edgy and explorative not just in technology but also in organizational relationships. Individual libraries, each to their own, are not going to be able to provide a lot of traditional library services (like d2d) in a world where scale trumps so much. They may well provide, as individual organizations, a set of other very interesting, assistive tools and services. Much of what we have done is going or gone, and we must be bold - and occasionally reckless - as we venture into new areas.

Development of new initiatives and technologies, in and of itself, must be directed towards directions that drive collaborative definitions of libraries. These are new forms of services and engagements, and there is much more at stake than the best new metadata schema or simply making content optimally available for harvesting.