friends / colleagues / etc :) the thoughts of DLF staff are slowly beginning to turn (overcoming the inertia of the summer) towards the fall forum. this fall, like the last Forum, the DLF Board will meet before us, and so we will try to reprise our "Big Issues" segment on the first day. I'm trying to think of some fun things for that, so stay tuned (and send me your most outrageous suggestions!). in a wee while, we'll do an open solicitation for papers. however, I I would like us to start think about certain themes that strike me as particularly important, although there are always going to be places for great papers and talks on damn near any topic. the following memes seem to be particularly interesting right now; you'll see that many of them may not be usual suspects : moving images : I have a high interest in DLF member institutions moving up the learning curve on film/video projects, and to begin tackling the huge challenges in re making this content accessible. and per my recent Lot 49 conference (see post on O'Reilly Radar) my emphasis is very much on /access/ vs utopian preservation schemes. this will involve libraries with many other different institutions - a big theme of mine - as we will all benefit from collective engagement on the hard issues of making medium- and long-form video discoverable and accessible. science cyberinfrastructure : there's been a lot of talk about how libraries can be involved in humanities and social science cyber- infrastructure projects, as if we were uniquely capable of "soft" domains, or as if hard science somehow had everything figured out. I don't believe either proposition. Hum/SocSci CI work is critically important - but so is our engagement with hard science. we have huge expertise to bring to table, and many things to learn. managing massive data flows from real time sensoring projects - this is a critical topic for us, and it engages us deeply with our faculty. collaboration in virtual and social communities - DLF has started supporting a SecondLife initiative, and we will have some updates from that group. other explorations in virtual worlds are welcome. additionally, it seems to me that a lot of scholarly work and collaboration is being taken in widely available tools like facebook, and through technologies like instant messaging. how libraries might proactively seek to interface with these tools that engage us socially - providing services and content - is a cool market opportunity for digital libraries. accessing mass digitizations : the capabilities of private mass repositories of books and other content is progressing nicely, and the challenges of addressing our motivations to produce specific value-added services apart from commercial vendors is unabated. I know of several panels that will be considering various issues on these mass digitization projects, with a eye fortunately less on the mechanics and the wonders, and more on the challenges and questions posed for us at a deeper level. new content / new publishing : the explosion of different content formats for interactive manipulation means that libraries bear the challenge of thinking through whole new forms of publication that encourage re-use, annotation, and mashups for information and data extending far beyond text. dataset visualization tools like many eyes, video mash up tools such as those provided by Adobe, the development of platforms like AIR and Silverlight, all point to a multi-modal future. what do library services look like through the lens of these tools? what are the ramifications for publishing efforts? mobile applications : regardless of the particular value of the iphone, it is finally forcing an awareness of the capabilities of mobile convergence devices. IT will continue to be driven by the twin forces of minaturization and increasing sophistication - this is how we will increasingly discover, engage, interact, and author information. in a time/place where engagement with content means the capacity to author/mash/comment with information on highly portable, always-on, networked devices, what services can libraries contribute? with whom will we need to partner to acquire skills? these are just a sample of the topic areas that must motivate us moving forward. I encourage us to think *wildly* about the future; what confronts us will always be more audacious than our most imaginative visions. thanks - pb