

September 27, 2007
Stephen Chapman
Open Collections Program Manager
Harvard University
“Nature,” says Emerson, “is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.” The same may be said for electronic resources, the digital libraries in which they reside, and the expectations users bring to library systems and services. In the rapidly changing networked environment, how are research libraries to fulfill their mandates to preserve? Using selections from the California Digital Library, Harvard, and other collections, this talk will critique some of the strategies being used to impose context upon library content, then raise questions regarding the methods by which these contexts may be re-expressed, or at least documented, in the future.
Stephen Chapman was recently appointed Open Collections Program Manager for Harvard University. He previously served as Preservation Librarian for Digital Initiatives in Harvard’s Weissman Preservation Center. He is a member of the technical team managing Harvard’s Digital Repository Service and he regularly advises the Harvard community about reformatting strategies to create sustainable digital collections.