John,
I just met with the Library people who have been participating in the SDS
policy committee to talk about changes that we will make to the project
when we apply for an extension. There is general agreement that the policy
meetings have been interesting and useful for their discussions of
high-level research with policy implications, but that the effort required
by work assignments that have been developed in that committee have not
brought about the desired outcome. Another meeting has been set for next
Tuesday and none of the committee members are certain where the work of
this committee is heading in relation to establishing in-house Library
policies.
The members of the committee all agree that the policy meetings are more
like a seminar on digital library policy theory and propose that the
committee should immediately be turned into just that. We need to figure
out how that would work. It seems that it would be good to tie it into our
speaker series and also to open it up to other people from the Library and
IATH, as interested. Issues discussed in the seminar could be written up by
Sarah.
The Library will commit to immediately move to establish a group that will
write up a set of policies that we will propose back to the Library
collections committee. Our goal will be to have a set of policies that can
be used in the next year of the grant project as we move to actually
collecting the projects that we have been working with so far. As soon as
these policies are approved by the Library powers-that-be, we will
immediately start using them in the Library's general activities. We
believe that we can have at least a draft of those policies ready in time
for them to be included in the extension request for that SDS project.
These policies should be considered to be a pragmatic first step that can
feed into the rest of the SDS project. The policy research angle for the
rest of the project will be to figure out what is we learned during this
first pass and to further develop it based on our experience as we really
collect all of the projects in the next year. The seminar proposed above
could be used to develop and justify this feedback.
I will be away until the 20th, reading email, in the office that day and
then away again until the 30th (not reading email). We can talk when I return.
Thorny
__________________________________________________
Thornton Staples
tls@virginia.edu
Voice: 434-924-3975
Fax: 434-924-1431
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