MIT task force releases preliminary “Future of Libraries” report

MIT task force releases preliminary “Future of Libraries” report. Peter Dizikes. MIT News Office. October 24, 2016.
    An MIT task force released a preliminary report about making MIT’s library system an “open global platform” enabling the “discovery, use, and stewardship of information and knowledge” for future generations. It contains general recommendations to develop “a global library for a global university,” yet strengthen the library’s relationship with the local academic community and public sphere.  “For the MIT Libraries, the better world we seek is one in which there is abundant, equitable, meaningful access to knowledge and to the products of the full life cycle of research. Enduring global access to knowledge requires sustainable models for ensuring that past and present knowledge are available long into the future.”

The MIT task force arranged ideas into four “pillars":

1. Community and Relationships: interactions with local and global users
2. Discovery and Use: the provision of information
3. Stewardship and Sustainability: management and protection of scholarly resources
4. Research and Development: library practices and needs

The report suggests a flexible approach simultaneously serving students, faculty, staff, alumni, cooperating scholars, and the local and the global scholarly community. It recommends study of changes allowing quiet study as well as new types of instruction and collaboration. The library system needs to enhance its ability to disseminate MIT research, provide better  digital access to content, and generate open platforms for sharing and preserving knowledge. The report encourages the institution to help find solutions for the “preservation of digital research,” which the report says is a “major unsolved problem.”

The report engages advocates finding the right balance between analog and digital resources, since  “the materiality of certain physical resources continues to matter for many kinds of research and learning.” They see this as a high priority.

The Future of Libraries site has a link to the full PDF report.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Secret Libraries of History

The Secret Libraries of History. Fiona Macdonald. BBC.com. 19 August 2016.
     Religious or political pressures have meant that books have been hidden throughout history – whether in secret caches or private collections. This article looks at libraries that have been preserved over time, either to keep them hidden, or because of neglect.

• Syria’s secret library currently beneath the streets of a suburb of Damascus
• The Library Cave on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China, sealed for almost 1000 years.
• The Vatican Secret Archives with papal correspondences going back over 1000 years,
• The Cairo Genizah in a wall of the Ben Ezra synagogue containing almost 280,000 Jewish manuscript fragments from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries
• A Hidden Medieval Archive found in papers used in binding medieval books

[Note: This is a good reminder of what it is we are trying to do, to keep important content for future generations. Chris]

Digital Preservation Matters.

Tracing the contours of digital transformation, Part One

Tracing the contours of digital transformation, Part One. September 11, 2015.

     Interesting article about changing our institutions to encompass digital technology.  Some quotes and notes:

• “digital” transformation is, at it’s most fundamental level, not about digital technologies, but about people, mindsets, relationships, and things. 
• transforming our processes will deliver transformed products more effectively
• Delivering innovative (and even revolutionary) experiences is a lot easier to do from a position of knowing what you are (and aren’t) about. 
• there’s still plenty of work to be done to thoughtfully tackle the big issue of digital transformation and become a postdigital institution, "one that has normalized and internalized digital technologies to an extent that they permeate the whole institution and how the institution works".

Digital Preservation Matters.

NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Library Edition

NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Library Edition.  The New Media Consortium. September 2015. [PDF]     This report looks at how key trends, significant challenges, and developments in technology will impact academic and research libraries, and that this will be a technology-planning guide.  Among other things, it looks at research data management and access. Some notes and quotes:

• The move to a more expansive online presence is calling for state-of-the-art data management processes that both make content more discoverable and ensure long-term preservation. Libraries have long played key roles in this area and are continuing to refine their workflows as well as the digital infrastructures that support them. 
• Experts argue that librarians must recognize how social media is changing the nature of scholarly record elements and develop plans to properly capture and preserve these activities.
• Formats: Cambridge University Library in the UK offers researchers guidelines for choosing different formats for their data, with an emphasis on long-term sustainability. They assert that the format used for data collection can be different than the one used to archive that data, and recommend that researchers wait until the project is completed to convert their materials to any new formats. Other institutions encourage researchers to look to national agencies for digital file format best practice
• As universities generate more data over time, libraries are well poised to be the managers and curators of this information. By digitally archiving the datasets from every publication they contain, tagging them with keywords, and making them searchable, library databases can uncover links and patterns between studies, revealing the full trajectory of an idea as it grows.
• Metadata: The metadata preserves the meaning of data, ensuring the research materials will be searchable, discoverable, and accessible long-term
• Enhanced formats and workflows within the realm of electronic publishing have enabled experiments, tests, and simulation data to be represented by audio, video, and other media and visualizations.  The emergence of these formats has led to libraries rethinking their processes for managing data and linking them between various publications.
• As the types of mediums for research and data expand over time, library leaders must strategize and build sustainable databases that can house enormous amounts of research materials in nearly any format.
• An example of digital curation: Digital Curation at ETH Zurich. Through the ETH Data Archive, ETH-Bibliothek provides an infrastructure for the medium and long-term storage of digital information such as research data, documents, or images.
• Some institutions have data management services that were created to assist researchers with organizing, managing, and curating research data to "ensure its long-term preservation and accessibility".  They provide a data management planning tool plus an online repository for storing research materials and associated metadata. 
• Some libraries help researchers design digital data management and archival plans for the grans that they are applying to. 
• Digital  strategies [which includes Preservation/Conservation  Technologies]  are not so much technologies as they are ways of using devices and software to enrich teaching, learning, research, and information management.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Google is not the answer: How the digital age imperils history

Google is not the answer: How the digital age imperils history. John Palfrey. Salon.  May 30, 2015.
     We get better at storing digital content, but are not good and preserving our digital history. The problem in brief is that no one is doing enough to select and preserve the bits that really matter.
"One of the great paradoxes of the digital age is that we are producing vastly more information than ever before, but we are not very good at preserving knowledge in digital form for the long haul." Industry is good at creating storage systems but not very good at choosing and preserving the data that matters, and then being able to make it useful in the future. "We are radically underinvesting in the processes and technologies that will allow us to preserve our cultural, literary and scientific records."  We are continuously making progress in how we store our media, and trapping information in lost formats in the process. Obsolescence of unimportant information may, in fact, be a blessing, but not when the lost knowledge has historical significance.

It is possible to transfer information from one format to another; with enough effort and cost, most data can be transferred to formats that can be read today. But different problems come when we create information at such speed and scale.  Most data companies now are for-profit firms that are not in the business of long-term storage. And, unlike universities, libraries and archives, these businesses will probably not be around for hundreds of years. Plus, the amount of important information being created makes it very difficult to create scale-able solutions to curate the meaningful content.

"Today, librarians and archivists are not involved enough in selecting and preserving knowledge in born-digital formats, nor in developing the technologies that will be essential to ensuring interoperability over time. Librarians and archivists do not have the support or, in many cases, the skills they need to play the central role in preserving our culture in digital format." The Government Accountability Office even criticized the Library of Congress for its information technology practices:  “Library of Congress: Strong Leadership Needed to Address Serious Information Technology Management Weaknesses.”

"The deeper problem behind the problem of digital preservation is that we undervalue our libraries and archives." We under-invest in them in them in an important time as we move from an analog society to a digital one. "If we fail to support libraries in developing new systems, those who follow us will have ample reason to be angry at our lack of foresight."

"If we don’t address our underinvestment in libraries and archives, we will have too much information we don’t need and too little of the knowledge we do."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Turning a page: downsizing the campus book collections

Turning a page: downsizing the campus book collections. Donald Barclay. The Conversation. August 19, 2015. 
     An article looking at the changing academic libraries and especially the printed book collections. "While I believe there will always be a place for the book in the hearts of academics, it is far less likely there will be a place for the book, or at least for every book, on the academic campus." Keeping a printed book in a library is not cheap. A recent study shows that it costs $4.26 per year to keep a book on the shelf in an open stack collection. The cost of keeping a book in high-density shelving $0.86 per book. This does not mean that the books are disappearing, but that alternative storage solutions are being explored. Books are more in a supporting role rather than the main role.

Digital Preservation Matters.

QNL all set to become regional heritage hub

QNL all set to become regional heritage hub. Gulf Times. 20 August 2015.
     Qatar National Library has been selected by IFLA as the regional Arabic Speaking Preservation and Conservation Centre. There currently are 13 such centers worldwide. The goal is to ensure that library and archive materials in all formats will be preserved in accessible form as long as possible.
The center will represent 25 countries in the Middle East and North Africa where Arabic is one of the official languages and will be helping to preserve the region’s heritage and culture and make them available for future generations. The project activities will include workshops on preventive and active conservation, production of web pages and digital preservation.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Asimov, Archives and Records

Asimov, Archives and Records. Chris Erickson. August 12, 2015.
     When I started working with digital preservation, a co-worker referred me to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Several passages in two of the books sounded very much like what we are dealing with now, though the time frames are much longer.  Here are some quotes from those books I thought interesting:

Foundation, pp. 34-35.

• "Q. How do you propose to do this?"
• "A. By saving the knowledge of the race. The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man; any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know. They will be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, will not be passed on. They will be lost through the generations. But, if we now prepare a giant summary of all knowledge, it will never be lost. Coming generations will build on it, and will not have to rediscover it for themselves...." 
•  "Why, then, should we concern ourselves with events of three centuries distance?” 
• "I shall not be alive half a decade hence,” said Seldon, “and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, ‘humanity.’ ”

Foundation and Earth, pp. 5, 11, 15.

• "Those myths and legends are all there are. There are no actual records, no documents.”
• “Documents twenty thousand years old? Things decay, perish, are destroyed through inefficiency or war.”
• “But there should be records of the records; copies, copies of the copies, and copies of the copies of the copies; useful material much younger than twenty millennia. They have been removed."
• "Those documents are referred to in known historical records, but the documents no longer exist in the Galactic Library. The references to them may exist, but any quotations from them do not exist.”
• "You cannot have a reasonable civilization without records of some kind."
• "A civilization in being is not likely to destroy its early records. Far from judging them to be archaic and unnecessary, they are likely to treat them with exaggerated reverence and would labor to preserve them."

(And another site with similar quotes). Preservationists aren't looking that far ahead yet, but with the research into permanent storage technology that is being done, records and archives could be permanent.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Library science: The word on our archival future

Library science: The word on our archival future. Michael Lesk. Nature. 23 April 2015.
     Most libraries are facing a “perfect storm”: decreasing use, inadequate resources, and users satisfied with easy access to online information. US research libraries saw a 69% decline in the number of queries handled between 1991 and 2012. Academic library budgets are shrinking: from 3.7% of the total budget of a typical US university in the early 1980s to 1.8% in 2011. About half of an academic library budget is spent on acquisitions, which is increasingly consumed by journals. However, open-access publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLOS) provide information with no reader fee, changing the economics entirely. School libraries, which still have a key role in teaching scholarly habits, are suffering. “The school library should be as important as the school sports team.” The increasing commercialization of information raises barriers. Digital preservation of library holdings is riskier than traditional methods.

Will governments recognize the importance of libraries and librarians?  Political will is essential, as is innovative energy among librarians. Palfrey hopes that conventional and new library technologies will sit side by side. This is not common in technological change: car-rental companies do not run livery stables. I suspect that a more likely future is that libraries (and museums) will be divided into the 'wholesalers' that have large historic collections, such as the US Library of Congress or the British Library, and the 'retailers' such as university libraries, which serve faculties.

Related posts:

• Libraries are places of knowledge creation and librarians our educators
• Forecasting the Future of Libraries 2015 
• Robert Darnton closes the book
• Falling Though the Cracks: Digital Preservation and Institutional Failures
• Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google
• Libraries could outlast the internet, head of British Library says
• Are libraries sustainable in a world of free, networked, digital information?

 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Can history and geography survive the digital age?

Can history and geography survive the digital age?  Matthew Reisz. The Times Higher Education. July 10 2015.
A leading historical geographer has called on both his disciplines to find better ways of “navigating the digital world”.
Even though history and geography rank “among the greatest synthesizing disciplines” and could help to “make the world more meaningful, more legible, for everyone”, academics rely too much on outdated technology and run the risk of having their writings end up behind a "pay-wall universe”.
“History has traditionally required long-form prose,” and academics are encouraged to write in more more publishable formats. Books have been the standard method of writing, but these do not work as well for computers, phones, tablets and e-readers are not "suitable for long-form reading.” Also, “no file format is less suitable to a smartphone than a PDF”, and they are often hidden away behind paywalls, which are difficult to access and “invisible” to search engines. Academics might need to prepare for a world in which “intellectual endeavours take place in app space”. These disciplines are "better suited to the digital world than it might seem” because historians and geographers have always relied on stories, maps and descriptions.  That is "how we can navigate the digital world.”

Similar posts:

• How Do Users Search and Discover? 
• Forecasting the Future of Libraries 2015
• A Geospatial Approach to Library Resources
• Respected US professor says libraries are places of knowledge creation and librarians our educators.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Respected US professor says libraries are places of knowledge creation and librarians our educators.

Respected US professor says libraries are places of knowledge creation and librarians our educators. CILIP . 2 July 2015.

• R. David Lankes: librarians have the power to change the world by “promoting informed democracy”.
• “Libraries are not about books, and librarians are not about collections, nor are they about waiting to serve. Our libraries are mandated, mediated spaces owned by the community, and librarians are educators dedicated to knowledge creation who exist to unleash the expertise held within their community.”
• There is a need for a skilled workforce to properly understand and manage information

A new innovation also mentioned is the Ideas Box , a durable, portable library in a box that is designed to provide access to vital information and culture in humanitarian crises. Pioneered by Bibliothèques Sans Frontières/Libraries Without Borders, it can be sent to refugee camps and other remote populations anywhere in the world and set up in under an hour."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google.

Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google. Amien Essif. AlterNet. May 23, 2015.
     This article is in response to the book BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google. Of all the public and private institutions we have, the public library is the truest democratic space. The library’s value is obvious.  A Gallup survey found that libraries are not just popular, they are extremely popular. "Over 90% of Americans feel that libraries are a vital part of their communities, compared to 53% for the police, 27% for public schools, and 7% for Congress. This is perhaps the greatest success of the public sector."

Yet, a government report showed that while the nation’s public libraries served 298 million people in 2010 (96% of the U.S. population) funding has been cut drastically. “It seems extraordinary that a public service with such reach should be, in effect, punished despite its success.” Libraries are becoming more important, not less, to our communities and our democracy.

About 90% of all existing data is less than two years old.  Much of the information could be moderated for the public good, and libraries are able to do that. However, tech companies have put themselves into this role; "the risk of a small number of technically savvy, for-profit companies determining the bulk of what we read and how we read it is enormous."

Libraries are at risk because politicians are moving away from the public good, "favoring private enterprise and making conditions ripe for a Google-Apple-Amazon-Facebook oligopoly on information."
"It’s not too much of a stretch to say that the fate of well-informed, open, free republics could hinge on the future of libraries.”

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving the Born-Digital Record: Many more questions than answers

Preserving the Born-Digital Record: Many more questions than answers. James G. Neal. American Libraries. May 28, 2015.
The world is producing vast amounts of born-digital material. The volume, complexity, and dynamism of this information challenge us to think creatively about its capture, organization, and long-term preservation and usability. What is the role of the library? Is this a source of failure or opportunity for the global library community?

This is an issue of integrity, of the collective adherence to a code and standard of values, of maintaining human records as complete, unimpaired, and undivided as possible. The ability to consult the evidence and sources used by researchers and authors will be lost if those digital records are not available. The ability to research and investigate the history and current state of our world will be compromised if born-digital materials are gone or changed. The ability to access the sources of record will be difficult if they are deposited and dispersed into multiple and disparate sites. This is the challenge of repository chaos.

At the core of born-digital content preservation and archiving are four principles.

1. We cannot preserve what we have not collected.
2. We must enable access, which brings persistence.
3. We must secure and curate the content.
4. We must take care of the content as steward.

How does born-digital content fit into what libraries do? Libraries select, acquire, synthesize, preserve and archive information, and enable users to understand, use, and apply information. This supports teaching and learning, research and scholarship.

Quality equals content plus functionality. To make sure that the born-digital content is preserved and usable in the long term we must understand and accommodate the important characteristics of digital information. With born-digital resources we must also consider the relationship among form, text, and function, context, renderability, and versioning over time. "We see the inevitability of physical and format obsolescence, the importance of authenticity and provenance, and the role of standards such as globally unique identifiers."

The scope, depth, and cost of the threat mean that individual libraries adequately preserve born-digital content alone. We need to promote cooperation and new public–private partnerships. The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) is an example of this. "We will not have the technologies, tools, workflows, or standards unless we work together in new ways."

Libraries must take on responsibility for the preservation of born-digital content.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Libraries could outlast the internet, head of British Library says

Libraries could outlast the internet, head of BritishLibrary says. Hannah Furness. The Telegraph. 25 May 2015.
Roly Keating, director of the British Library, said he was shocked at how many "smart people" still questioned whether libraries were still viable in the modern age.

Stop worrying about whether libraries will survive the digital age, that they could outlast the internet.
Libraries have countless values worth defending, including trust, that pre-dated the internet. Libraries have a vital place in communities and could prove the most "powerful and resiliant network yet". "And what we collectively believe libraries are and are for will determine what form they survive in."

 "But the time frame we think on, centuries back and centuries into the future, allows us to think about trust in its highest sense, and authentication and provenance of information, and digital information in particular.

"Those are hard-won privileges and values and they're worth defending."

"And in some ways they are the most powerful and resiliant network of all, if we continue to believe in them."

"With all our fascination of and love for the internet in the age of data, these values and the values and idea of the library predated the internet and if we get it right may yet outlast it.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Robert Darnton closes the book

Robert Darnton closes the book. Corydon Ireland. Harvard Gazette. May 11, 2015.
Article about his retirement. Notes:

• He and others discussed how to harness the Internet to create a digital library that would “get our cultural heritage available to everyone” for free, leading to the DPLA
• The goal of the free digital library “was a dream of philosophers of the Enlightenment. We can do what Jefferson only dreamed of. We have the Internet, and he only had the printing press.”
• Of digital and print: "Both are complementary means of knowledge dispersal and both are thriving."
• For libraries to prosper requires advancing on two fronts, analog and digital. “We must acquire everything important in all fields of scholarship" along with “electronic outputs of all kinds, partly in cooperation with other libraries.”
• The future of libraries will require “being connected, and cooperating on a very large scale” regarding acquisition, preservation, and storage.
• The library still pumps intellectual energy into every corner of campus.

Digital Preservation Matters.

“An alarmingly casual indifference to accuracy and authenticity.” What we know about digital surrogates

“An alarmingly casual indifference to accuracy and authenticity.” What we know about digital surrogates. James A Jacobs. Free Government Information. March 1, 2015.
Post examines several articles concerning the reliability and accuracy of digital text extracted from printed books in five digital libraries: the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, the HathiTrust, Google Books, and the Digital Public Library of America.

In a study by Paul Conway of page images in the HathiTrust, he found 25%  of the 1000 volumes examined by Conway contained at least one page image whose content was “unreadable.” Only 64.9% of the volumes examined were considered accurate and complete enough to be considered “reliably intelligible surrogates.”  HathiTrust only attests to the integrity of the transferred file, and not to the completeness of the original digitization effort. 

The “uncorrected, often unreadable, raw OCR text” that most mass-digitization projects produce today, will be inadequate for future, more sophisticated uses. Libraries that are concerned about their future and their role in the information ecosystem should look to the future needs of users when evaluating digitization projects. Libraries have a special obligation to preserve the historic collections in their charge in an accurate form. 

Cites articles:

•  Kichuk, Diana. “Loose, Falling Characters and Sentences: The Persistence of the OCR Problem in Digital Repository E-Books.” 
• Conway, Paul. “Preserving Imperfection: Assessing the Incidence of Digital Imaging Error in HathiTrust,” 2013.
• Jacobs, James A., and James R. Jacobs. “The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: A Consumer-Oriented Standard.” D-Lib Magazine 19, no. 3/4 (March 2013).
  
  
  Digital Preservation Matters.

A Geospatial Approach to Library Resources

A Geospatial Approach to Library Resources. Justin B. Sorensen. D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2015.
The fire insurance maps are a valuable resource. Digital versions of the original printed maps have been created and have been converted into georeferenced raster datasets, using ArcGIS software, aligning each map to its appropriate geospatial location to maintain consistent digital overlays for all of the historic maps. This allows the information to be displayed, expressed and presented in completely new ways. GIS can be one of the many tools libraries will have available to assist them in sharing their resources with others.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Forecasting the Future of Libraries 2015

Forecasting the Future of Libraries 2015. Miguel Figueroa. American Libraries. February 26, 2015. 
While it’s nearly impossible to accurately predict the future, we can identify trends that can be key in understanding what the future might bring. It is important for libraries to spot trends and integrate them into their programs and services in order to remain useful and relevant. An article “Trending Now,” lists 5 trends that are worth looking at:

1. Anonymity: it may help build community and is an increasingly important part of web interactions.
2. Collective impact: organizations are adopting common agendas to address issues in the community. Librarians could become highly valued partners in collective-impact responses
3. Fast casual: establishements incorporate customized services and products, and also inte­grate technology, with customer loyalty apps, online or mobile ordering, and mobile payments. Fast casual has advanced the growth of living-room-like flexible spaces (multiple and varied seating arrangements, easy-to-find power outlets) that accommodate social and business needs, and are tech­nologically savvy.
4. Resilience: Resilience includes preparation for and rapid recovery from physical, social, and economic di­sasters, including natural disasters, terrorist at­tacks, or economic collapse.
5. Robots: libraries have seen robots and robotics as a next wave for technology access and training, even lending robots to help users experience what might soon be a regular part of their futures. [They could also be places to learn more about technology.]

The trend library is designed to provide the library community with a centralized and regularly updated source for trends—including how they are developing; why they matter for libraries; and links to the reports, articles, and resources that can further explain their significance. As a collection, it will grow to include changes and trends across society, technology, education, the environment, politics, the economy, and demographics.  Makerspaces are playing an increasingly important role in libraries.

Another article “The Future, Today”addresses similar concepts:

• Digital downloads, ebooks, personal content, and live programming together with books, periodicals, microfilm, audio, and video in today’s libraries. The library of the future will  support and en­hance navigation and exchange of these new forms of information. Library services must be delivered in ways that are digitally based or conveniently located in public places to help users with their busy schedules
• Collections are being carefully consid­ered so as not to occupy too much square footage, leaving room for tech and social spaces, and a center for multiple activi­ties.  
• Library staff in the future will be organized on the floor to be more effec­tive ‘information guides’ to help patrons.
• There will be more flex­ible spaces for evolving services and forms of information offering.  
• Libraries are no longer single-purpose repositories of books dedicated to quiet study. They have become dynamic hubs in various ways for the community of users

Digital Preservation Matters.

Falling Though the Cracks: Digital Preservation and Institutional Failures

Falling Though the Cracks: Digital Preservation and Institutional Failures. Jerome McDonough. CNI.  December 2014. Video.
A video that explores whether libraries, archives and museums are designed in a way to really provide long-term access to cultural heritage materials. Why are we doing digital preservation, how to do it better, how do we do librarianship better.  Looks at OAIS and the complexities of preserving cultural materials. Need to train people to have broader perspectives across different fields, such as librarians, archivists, and curators.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Building Productive and Collaborative Relationships at the Speed of Trust

Building Productive and Collaborative Relationships at the Speed of Trust. Todd Kreuger. Educause Review. March 2, 2015.
To make projects successful, it is important to create trust and collaboration among IT, staff, and campus groups. To create that trust, the staff must establish highly productive relationships with the school's departments, faculty, and students. Collaboration, design thinking, and innovation go hand-in-hand. Many projects fall short of customer needs, fail or achieve less than satisfactory results, including plenty of finger pointing and wasted time, money, and opportunity. Some of the lessons learned:

• Get on the same page
• Build and establish trust
• Provide the tools and expectations for success
• Focus on both strategic and operational needs
• Clarify process ownership and the associated responsibilities
• Recognize the desired performance and celebrate success

It is critical to have an open dialogue with various customer groups and to attempt to exceed their expectations. Another challenge is to ensure that people recognize the past as the past and not as an indicator of future performance. The best way to begin a change in culture is to identify issues and challenges that you can immediately address. The reservoir of trust is built one action at a time and emptied in a hurry. To steadily build trust, you must say what you are going to do and do what you say. Communication is the heart and soul of trust. It is imperative that you ask appropriate questions and listen to gain understanding. Collaboration should not be a project in and of itself, but the way in which we work.

Cycle of Productivity model. Processes and tasks must have a defined owner and be documented and published, and change must be managed to ensure that everyone is aware of the new expectations. The basic premise is that training, assessment of effectiveness, and feedback all must occur to ensure the process or task is completed as expected.

The end result "is one in which a culture of collaboration, coupled with a relentless focus on challenging the status quo, results in our encouraging, pushing, and helping each other innovate, transform, and differentiate."  

Digital Preservation Matters.