It's that time of year: DLF sends its invoices out to its membership, and waits for the checks to roll back in so we can keep the lights on, the disks spinning, and the RAM confused.

It is customary for the Director to send out a brief message rallying the troops. This is part of what I wrote to the Library Directors and Provosts who comprise my Board:

The coming year will shape critical issues across the realms of libraries, publishing, and scholarship. As vast amounts of data accumulate in a small number of hands guided by the principles of the marketplace, we must formulate and advance our interests with a solidity of focus and purpose which we never before had need to forge. The issues of information access, the re-assertion of individual privacy, re-writing our understanding of intellectual property and fair use, and encouraging learning across our global reach are critical touch-points for DLF and our allied organizations. We must seek to work together – with shared planning and purpose – to develop services that enable the collaborative creation of scholarship and the promulgation of education, all the while transforming our organizations. Enhanced mobility, increasingly rich media choices, and the democratization of contribution have the potential to trigger one of the most creative periods in the history of human thought if we are alert enough, clever enough, and sensitive enough to shape and learn from the changes around us.

We welcome and encourage your participation not merely in our DLF Forums (the next to be held in Philadelphia, November 5-7, 2007), but more urgently in on-line forums, in our face-to-face meetings, and in individual engagements with our communities. The world is enmeshed in an increasingly open and urgent conversation, and our voice is important and clear. When we are given the opportunity to speak, we have an obligation to do so; when we have no opportunity, we must make one.

Please raise your voices with me.

2007:05:18