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Cornell University Library
Minutes of the Academic Assembly
March 1, 2001

  1. Sarah Thomas announced that

    * Constance Finlay will fill our mid-year vacancy on the Academic Personnel Policy
             Committee.
    * Oya Rieger has been appointed the CUL Coordinator of Distance Learning.
             Congratulations, Oya and good luck with your new responsibilities.
    * Adam Chandler won the Samuel Lazerow Fellowship for 2001 for his proposal,
             "An Application Profile and Prototype Metadata Management System for Licensed
             Electronic Resources." Congratulations from CUL and ACRL.
    * See my announcement about our March 19 program on scholarly communication titled:
             "Jumping off the Page."
    * Information about LibQual will soon be sent to members of CUL.

  2. Sarah Thomas introduced our guest speaker, Herbert Van de Sompel, who presented a modified version of his closing plenary address made at the Coalition for Networked Information Conference in December, 2000,
    "The Roof is on Fire."
    [For those not in attendance, it is difficult, if not impossible, to capture the energy and enthusiasm Van de Sompel brings to his subjects. The following URL will lead readers to the CNI conference cited above. Please scroll down to Van de Sompel's plenary address and click on the icon which, with Adobe Acrobat, will display Van de Sompel's slides. The following brief description will not attempt to fill in the blanks but will, we hope, interest CUL members in the library's role in scholarly communication enough to continue exploring the subject on March 19.]

    http://www.cni.org/tfms/2000b.fall/agenda2000Ftf.html

    Mr. Van de Sompel's stimulating power-point presentation consisted of two related segments, the first concrete and the second speculative. In the first segment, Van de Sompel previewed the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting (OAMH) Protocol in which he related the service provider (harvester) to the data provider (repository). Interoperable protocols like OAMH open the door to federated services, database synchronization and harvesting the deep web. In the second, Van de Sompel presented an insightful overview of the key functions in scholarly communication - registration certification, awareness and archiving - and analysed our traditional (paper) version in comparison with the PDF (scanned copy of paper) version. Two related, but not integral, functions are rewarding and accessibility.

    Next, he invited CUL members to focus on the key functions of scholarly communication and imagine these elements in a digital scholarly communication system based on pre-prints. Drawing on Christensen's recent book, The Innovator's Dilemna, Van de Sompel described pre-prints as a disruptive technology which can teach us to think about how the functions of a scholarly communication system can interoperate disregarding their implementation. Between authors and readers, with kinds of protocols that technology is allowing us to develop, new players can be introduced and old players can take on new roles.

    For many of us in the audience, Van de Sompel's remarks about the potential for libraries in an evolving system of scholarly communication, was the most exciting and inspiring portion of his presentation. Essentially, libraries need to re-think themselves and their functions while being pro-active in exploring alternative mechanisms for scholarly communication. Libraries are in a great position to do so given their history with and knowledge of the key functions in scholarly communication. While we didn't see the roof on fire, we hope that a brown-bag session with Mr. Van de Sompel will allow CUL members to continue the speculation, add fuel to the fire, or put out the flames.

    Lorna Knight, Secretary
    Academic Assembly Steering Committee
    (Marty Kurth, Deb Lamb-Deans, Lynn Brown, Tom Turner)

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    3/8/01, jwg