Friday, January 9, 2009

Libraries and I.T.

Yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Ed's "Wired Campus" bulletin features an interesting letter from Pat Steele and Brad Wheeler at Indiana Univ. about the importance of productive working relationships between academic libraries and campus IT departments.

From the letter: "None of the compelling issues facing academic libraries today can be accomplished without strong support from IT departments. ...And, we should note, none of these initiatives can be advanced successfully by IT departments without the expertise, knowledge management, and relationships that librarians provide. Together we do more."

Especially interesting is the mention of cross-institutional collaboration, one example of which is the Hathitrust, and ARL's plan to introduce a new measure of collaboration in 2009.