James Michalko, RLG

Welcome to the 2002 RLG annual meeting! You may know that we don't structure these meetings like the annual meetings of commercial organizations. Rather, we try to structure them as conferences that strike some kind of challenging theme that all of us might enjoy. We try to offer a different kind of perspective on the work that all of our institutions are doing, to get some people who are not usually part of the conversations that we have with one another to challenge us. It is the kind of conference we would like to go to and be happy to attend.

Nonetheless, it is our annual meeting and gives me an opportunity to talk with you about the organization. As we go through today and the next day, I think we will see where some of RLG's organizational themes intersect with the conference theme—the notion of creating knowledge—and where our current activities may in some small but systematic ways contribute to the structures that support that activity.

There are lots of vehicles that we use to communicate with you during the year about all the activities, telling you about opportunities, talking about progress, but I acknowledge that they are also part of the enormous information overload that all of you have. Not only am I sure, but it is also quite understandable that a lot of those messages that we try to send to you are lost in the number of signals that are coming in. That is why this is a particularly good chance to inform you directly about some of what I think you ought to know.

What I can provide, I think, is an overview that will give you a context in which all of these other communications that we deliver will take on some proper interest and importance. I will tell you some specifics, but I also emphasize the kind of higher strategic level, the sort of trajectory that the organization is embarked on. At the very end I will return to specifics of what I think is a very interesting, exciting, and challenging future that we are working to create with you for the organization.

2002 Board Elections

Before I talk about some specific highlights and the future, I want to give credit to the RLG Board of Directors for their work. They are the ones who help us set the trajectory that I was just talking about—and who monitor it. They are the ones who ensure that we take into account a balancing of the interests of all our members with the resources that we have in order to produce continuing benefit for all the varied communities that we serve.

You have just finished selecting directors, and I am pleased to tell you how that election came out. We are welcoming a new director and a returning director in each category. From the general members, David Ferriero, Duke University, has been elected and will join us for the first time in October. Tom Leonard, who is here with us from Berkeley, has been returned to the board. From the special members, Doralynn Pines, the deputy director of administration at Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be joining the board this fall, and Peggy Seiden, who is here with us from Swarthmore College, will return to the board.

I want to thank all the people who were involved in the election—the ones who ran and those who voted and made these choices and my colleagues on the board who served with good grace and good counsel throughout.

Highlights of the Past Year

Let me turn to the highlights of the past year, some of the things that our board has overseen and directed us in managing as we have gone forward. I am not going to dwell on all the activity of the past year and I am not going to inventory everything that has been going on. All of that is recorded in this new edition of RLG News [spring 2002, issue 54]—which is out on the table. It is a very good summary of what the organization is doing and what it has accomplished—and the directions we are taking.

Almost everything that is mentioned in the News has been communicated to you, much of it in the executive briefings that my colleague Linda West compiles and sends to you each month. I urge you to forward those on to your own staffs; they are a good way to stay in touch. We try our best to make sure that they are brief and don't contribute to a lot of overload.

I want to point out three areas of progress that I think are noteworthy and resonate for our future.

RLG Cultural Materials. The release in the current year of the RLG Cultural Materials service represents a very important milestone. It is an example of an activity that really embodies what RLG should be doing. It addresses a need. It satisfies a demand. It serves research. It requires significant multi-institutional kinds of discussion to agree on common approaches to these very hard issues, and it has a service dimension that extends beyond the participants who are directly involved out to the broad community. What is more, it is going to have an ongoing programmatic character to it in the sense that, since it is an evolving service, it is going to require continuous member input on content matters, technical matters, policy matters, business issues. It is going to touch all parts of the organization and be part of what RLG is about. We delivered it when we said we were going to, and I think it should make all the institutions who were involved and all the folks who were instrumental in doing that feel very good.

Digital preservation. RLG also delivered this past year on considerable groundwork for long-term retention of digital materials. This was at least in part the consequence of a very explicit and very useful working alliance with OCLC. It really has coalesced a lot of intellectual work that was being done on various levels and in various dimensions on this very hard, daunting, but inescapable challenge. I think this past year's effort has brought us to a kind of tipping point—not that the work is going to be an easy slide from here on, but it has now moved the side of intellectual engagement with the issues to the side of really trying to solve some of them in an operational way. I think it has tipped us toward the implementation period. From here on we are going to see a lot of very productive activity in our communities. It is that kind of threshold issue where progress is going to be widespread and very noticeable.

Resource sharing. Finally, the work that has gone on in resource sharing represents a similar tipping point. RLG has worked hard to establish the viability of a very different model of resource sharing: the peer-to-peer model. It is now supported by new tools—not just by the ILL Manager work that we have accomplished but by all of the software now out there that is compliant with the standards we worked to create. We have seen discussions about resource sharing tipped in some interesting ways toward a very different landscape. People are thinking about services differently; they are thinking differently about national boundaries. I think they are thinking differently about materials and what can in fact be part of the universe of sharable materials.

Of all the efforts that we have been involved in this year, I would point to those three as things that will have lingering consequences and contribute to the shape of the future. This will be evident in what else I have to report.

Salute to John Haeger ( John Haeger, right, with Lee Jones, Linda Hall Library, at the RLG annual meeting)

I want to open a large but important parenthesis to thank someone who has in fact served RLG extraordinarily for more than two decades and is now coming to the end of his career at RLG. My friend and colleague John Haeger, who is here with us, is attending what may be his final annual meeting. As you know, John retired from full-time RLG involvement about two years ago. He continued to work with us on a part-time basis, something that we welcomed and have been very glad that he was doing. At the time that he retired from full-time work we gave him the honorific of Vice-President Emeritus. I think he is entitled to it and we are going to let him keep it. If we were another kind of organization, we would probably have a building named after him or something. Given the kind of organization that we are, maybe when we next move our headquarters , we will name a conference room after him.

John is going to continue to the end of this fiscal year with his work with us, and he has assured me that he is prepared to be called back if we need him for a particular assignment, like Cincinnatus from his fields—although in John's case I guess it would be from his vineyard.

This is not really the moment to inventory John's career at RLG and the extraordinary contributions that he has made. The fact that we are all gathered here and that more than half of you represent organizations from outside North America is, I think, largely due to the kind of transformational thinking and leadership that John provided us for so many years. He did so much to create RLG as it exists right now, to form new services, to foster new relationships, to establish new horizons for the organization. I think this kind of gathering with these kinds of institutions in this kind of venue is probably the best example of his contribution.

More than 20 years ago John came to RLG. He was the associate program coordinator. Interestingly enough, for those of you who are not steeped in RLG history, our programs at that time were devoted to collections and their management, resource sharing, and preservation. I think we picked the right issues. If you are going to be in business, pick ones that don't get solved.

There were special programs in art and architecture, law and East Asian studies, all of which we continue to be very strong in and in which I think we make a continuing contribution.

Speaking about East Asian studies, John and I were coming out here on the plane together and as we were staring at the airline monitors changing from English to Chinese characters that scrolled across the screen to make sure that the planes leaving for Beijing were apparent to the Chinese travelers, John remarked, "Think about how hard that was 20 years ago." Now it is trivial.

John was later the director of program coordination. In fact, his task was supposed to be—and I quote from the job description—"to provide intellectual leadership for RLG programs and their justification in relation to trends in scholarship research and resource allocation in universities." I think he did this extraordinarily successfully. The organization changed as a consequence of John's contributions, and there are echoes of the things in which he was involved throughout our current activities and in the ways that we work with you.

Many of the things we did in research information management were a consequence of John's leadership, in fundraising, in electronic publishing, in business development. He helped transform the RLG board. He was one of the people who got some of the first outside directors involved—people like Jack Sawyer from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Neil Rudenstein, president of the Mellon Foundation and then of Harvard, sat on our board.

Probably John's most lingering contribution as far as the RLG staff is concerned is that he was the first one to bring his dog to the office—and all the dogs thank you, John.

I wanted to make sure that you had a chance to thank our Vice-president Emeritus for his contribution and for his career at RLG. I hope that John will stay the kind of friend and colleague that he has been for these many years.

Looking Ahead

We are very aware that all of your institutions are deeply engaged, explicitly or in practice, in reinventing yourselves—what you do and how you think about your mission for the future. Every institution represented here and everybody in the RLG membership are really trying hard to figure out and establish their future role with the different communities that they serve. What is a library, what is an archive, what is a museum going to be in the digital world? What kinds of new and different contributions to research, scholarship, and teaching are going to be made? How do we continue to be vital in those enterprises? What will memory institutions mean to the communities that we serve in this digital age? Those kinds of basic questions are being engaged at a very fundamental level within the institutions. The fact is that we, RLG, have to engineer ourselves to support whatever the emerging future you see for yourself is going to be.

We call the same questions for RLG. What is a support and service organization like RLG supposed to do and be in that future? We don't know exactly, but we can think about the ways in which the organization is going to have to change. We can anticipate some of the directions, and I want to talk a bit about those directions both generally and specifically.

Earlier I mentioned the trajectory of an organization, and I used that word in a specific way. It has to do with the location of a moving body through space. Organizations do have trajectory. They do choose the way in which they are going to move.

Engineering RLG's Future

What is going to help determine that trajectory—and, again, I use that word very specifically—is not just strategic directions; it is organizational vectors that have some momentum and have a direction. You apply choices and a priority and invest resources. That is what gives the trajectory momentum; that is what gives it weight; that is what gives it direction.

I can give you some specific examples about some of the choices that we have made on the vectors that are going to influence the kinds of projects and priorities RLG works on.

As you struggle with engineering your organization's future, I am sure you are grappling with some of the same kinds of vectors. You are making choices about program directions. You are reexamining your aspirations for services. You are trying to establish the kind of infrastructure that is going to support those services in the future, and you are wondering how you are going to assemble the resource mix that will actually let you do all those things.

RLG as a whole is no different. In our case these are going to be defining organizational characteristics that we have to move and manipulate if we are going to shape our future. We have to give them direction and magnitude.

Program directions.

Program directions are really at the heart of the organization and our mission. What is crucial about them? It is simple: They align with what is important to the membership. We think there are some general principles, which I have bulleted here, that guide how we judge what is important and how well those directions align.

In particular, I think we have to be very explicit in acknowledging and really maximizing something that has been important to the organization's success over the years: RLG has to provide professional leadership where it is appropriate. We have to partner as productively and as often as we can with the groups of institutions here on chosen issues, and then we have to sharpen our direct support for you in a way that allows these issues to be engaged within your organizations.

We are committed to those major areas that RLG decided on just a few years ago—resource sharing, primary sources, and digital archiving. I think in all three areas—and I joked in my remarks about John Haeger about our having chosen the problems that will never be solved—it is not so much that they don't get solved, but that the nature of the challenge alters over time. In each of these areas there are new challenges and new opportunities that need to be grappled with and exploited over the next few years.

Service profile. The criteria that I think are going to drive RLG services include efficient record supply and contribution, optimization for reference and discovery, an emphasis on research resources, and a reflection of contemporary information-seeking practices.These criteria really take advantage of both strengths and opportunities that we have and can use to provide you and other organizations with useful services. Again and again we hear the call that trusted information is getting to be more and more difficult to identify, more and more inaccessible, and less and less visible to the kinds of communities we serve. There is a role and an opportunity there for RLG.

Technology infrastructure. We all grapple with this one. RLG has to put in place the kind of deep, changed technical infrastructure that will allow us to do all the kinds of things that the future demands. I've bulleted certain characteristics that we are aiming for. I don't think these are different from your own institutions' criteria. But we have to understand where as institutions and where as an organization we can lead and where we must be clever about adopting, buying rather than building, and only innovate when it is crucial to the communities that we know really well and serve. I think this is the key issue about making the underpinning technology changes.

Revenue contour. Occasionally we are criticized for using the word "revenues," which I find interesting. You can call it "resources" if you want; it is all the same. The question is, How does RLG assemble the kinds of resources to continue to serve the communities that depend on this organization? These include expanding our "markets" for reference and information discovery, incorporating grants and sponsorship, and making good alliances.

Priorities, Projects

I have been talking fairly generally about key vectors and our intended emphasis and priority. Let me quickly mention some specific projects that I think embody such movement along those vectors.

A new regional office. We have planned and are about to open a new regional office in New York City. It will be small, with three to five people, to help accomplish the things I have outlined there. Nancy Elkington will be returning to the States from her post in the UK to head up that office. We will be making sure that our colleagues in the UK and on the Continent also have continuing support.

Migrating the database. At the same time, we are taking the first steps on the technology infrastructure that I was referring to earlier. We will be migrating all our databases to industry-standard software. This will have a whole variety of benefits associated with it, most of which I am hoping you won't particularly notice, other than that we do what we do better and more flexibly. It is a crucial change to be made for a vital future.

Cultural materials. This is central to RLG. Our work together really moves these objects into the mainstream of the research and learning environment. I think this is one of the crucial contributions that our organization can make over the next years. It will be a defining characteristic for all of you in the next few years—there is a huge contribution to be made here. I am pleased that RLG got this right in a collaborative course that began just about three years ago.

The RLG Cultural Materials Initiative liberates primary sources for research and learning, addresses a host of new issues collaboratively, and responds to the needs and desires of contributors, students, and faculty.

About those "new issues." I have been to many presentations about the Open Archives Initiative, OAI, a vision for how everything will be different and easier and better in the future. When you talk to those involved—and I've borrowed their slides from a variety of presentations—they usually end with "and here are all the issues that we are now encountering." The list is almost an exact roster of the issues that we took on at the start of RLG's cultural materials enterprise: policy, intellectual property, rights management, data conformance, and so on. I think we have a real opportunity because we dealt with some of the hard issues at the beginning. We can make a contribution to the larger community, and we have some momentum in this arena.

Testbed digital repository. As I noted earlier, RLG is going to do its part to move digital preservation and archiving from intellectual discourse to the point of beginning to implement service. What we are going to do exemplifies what a lot of institutions are going to have to do—use standards that we have all agreed on, take advantage as much as possible of what third parties can do better than we can do—as an institution or community, and start with the stuff that is important to your institution.

For this testbed exploration, we will use a large body of electronic materials that RLG already possesses. This includes RLG Cultural Materials, the "Marriage, Women, and the Law" materials that our "Studies in Scarlet" project produced, and a variety of RLG electronic publications. We're participating in the application of METS [Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard]. And we're talking with those third parties with proven capacity.

Research sharing. This is another place where there are huge new opportunities. I would focus on the way in which the demand and the need of the community are changing. We have to grapple with what it means to share the electronic collections that we are spending more and more money on, collecting and managing. We can't have that conversation come to a stopping point when someone says the magic words "intellectual property"—boom, end of discussion. Every time you listen to that your community wanders farther and farther away from you.

We have to think seriously about what it means to genuinely reengineer internal processes and services to respond to the expectations that people have out there. While digitizing on demand can be overstated, it suggests the kind of operation needed to continue being one of the support organizations that our constituencies rely on.

I think there is an enormous new set of opportunities and challenges associated with research sharing for the RLG membership. We are going to try to offer leadership and partnering over the next few years.

"Union Catalog on the Web." Finally, let me touch on a project that we have embarked on over the last nine months.

The biggest asset that RLG has besides its members and its staff is the RLG Union Catalog—what we used to call the RLIN database. It is the biggest asset that we are privileged to maintain on behalf of the membership. The way in which people think about it and the way in which people can use it are changing dramatically.

We have to optimize what usefulness that resource will have in this new environment. We think that means restructuring it, rethinking it, and then making it available freely in the general, open Web environment. This, I think, is a really intriguing, fascinating, and potentially transformational step to take. It allows us an opportunity to reinvent what people think a library catalog is. We have the potential to create the first place on the Web that the serious student and the serious scholar go to when looking for and trying to discover important, trusted information sources.

We are well along on this kind of thinking and have in fact a target to release the first, pilot version at the end of the calendar year. We will work with three to five RLG member institutions to promote this on their campuses and then work with them to refine it before we promote it much more broadly and widely. This is both a grant-funded research project and a big step in access. It is a really exciting opportunity, and it speaks to the way in which we are trying to provide some leadership as well as a venue for and a contribution to the kind of reinvention going on in your own institutions.

Aligning Agendas

In the final analysis, I want you to understand that we are taking serious steps to engineer a different kind of future for RLG, in the same ways that you are thinking about engineering a different future for your own organizations.

It is vital to have the right balance between listening, leading, collaborating, supporting—and ultimately aligning our agendas so that we get the most out of the kinds of effort and investment that we are all making. It is both a challenge and an opportunity. What I want you to take away is the crucial element that we need to be deeply in touch with how you are thinking about your own futures, so that we can support as well as provide some leadership as that reinvention goes on. Thank you.

Attendees assembling for the opening session; in the foreground, Chris Rusbridge,
University of Glasgow, Noel Hanf, RLG secretary, and Eric Ketelaar, program moderator