In October 1995, I was co-chair of the Task Force on the Archiving of Digital Information. I stood before the assembled membership of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and reported dutifully on the progress of the Task Force (Waters 1995). I noted in my talk then that William Safire had recently devoted his wonderful "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine to the topic of kids' slang. He advised that "if you want to stay on the generational offensive, when your offspring use the clichéd 'gimme a break,' you can top that expression of sympathetic disbelief with 'jump back' and the ever-popular riposte 'whatever.'" However, he also noted that some expressions, such as "I'm outta here" or "I'm history," had become very much dated. Quoting from a study of slang, Safire pointed out that "I'm history," is "a parting phrase modeled on an underworld expression referring to death, and it has both inspired and been replaced by the more trendy expression, 'I'm archives'" (Safire 1995: 30). Today, according to a recent article in the "Sunday Styles" section of the New York Times, the trendy have taken their slang to an even higher level of sophistication. They are now studiously avoiding being associated with mundane activities such as "hosting" or "selecting," and are instead opting to engage in the more up-to-the-minute and stylish activity of "curating."
Against the Grain / June 2016
This paper focuses on three factors that contribute to the sustainability of digital scholarly resources. First, the development of such resources depends on a clear definition of the audience and the needs of users. Second, the resource must be designed to take advantage of economies of scale. Third, to create an enduring resource, careful attention is needed to the design of the organization that will manage the resource over time. Contents Introduction The sustainability question Conclusion IntroductionIn 1992 the great religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan published a very useful book entitled The Idea of the University: A Reexamination. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Yale University, it is a meditation on and attempt to update John Henry Newman's classic work on higher education. In his Reexamination, Pelikan identified four core and enduring functions of higher education: research, teaching, the dissemination of knowledge through publication, and the preservation of, and access to, the scholarly record in libraries and archives (Pelikan, 1992). The latter two functionsdissemination and preservation and access -refer to the life cycle of scholarly resources that are produced and used in teaching and research and are the objects of scholarly communications.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has provided long-standing support for scholarly communications. The interest can be traced back to its predecessor foundations, which date back to the 1940s: the Bollingen and Old Dominion foundations, which were associated with Andrew's son, Paul; and to the Avalon Foundation, which had been established by Paul's sister, Ailsa. In 1969, Paul and Ailsa established the Mellon Foundation in honor of their father by merging the Old Dominion and the Avalon Foundations. The earliest actions of the new Mellon Foundation included providing support for the formative activities of modern library access, namely, the development of the OCLC regional networks, as well as the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and its Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN).Throughout its history of support for scholarly communications, the Foundation has been particularly interested in the applications of technology, especially for the development of various kinds of scholarly resources. The interest in technology, of course, has never been for its own sake. Rather the primary objective of Mellon's scholarly communications program is to promote the cost-effective creation, dissemination, accessibility, and preservation of high-quality materials that are essential for the advancement of humanistic studies broadly defined, and which are designed to persist through time to support such studies. In this paper, I focus on some of the Foundation's recent experience in supporting the creation of scholarly resources, and highlight the features that contribute to sustainability. The sustainability questionThe topic of sustainability is a large one (see, for example, Bowen, 2000; Council on Library and Information Resources, 2001;Lesk, 2002; Sm...
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