Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Report: The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship

http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub147/pub147.pdf

The Idea of Order explores the transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution, and the implications of this transition for managing research collections. The volume comprises three reports. The first, “Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?” by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, explores the degree to which a new research library can eschew print. The second, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” by Paul Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, argues that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries. The final report, “Ghostlier Demarcations,” examines how well large text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitization efforts meet the needs of scholars, and the larger implications of these projects for research, teaching, and publishing. The reports are introduced by Charles Henry; the volume includes a conclusion by Roger Schonfeld and an epilogue by Charles Henry.

Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Report: The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship