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I'd like to draw your attention to a series of recent DLF reports:

1) DLF Newsletters -- Volume 5, Number 1. Fall 2004

Thanks to the hard work of individuals at each of the following
institutions, and to Michael Pelikan (Pennsylvania State University),
the Newsletter editor, the following reports are available at
http://www.diglib.org/pubs/news05_01/  

        California Digital Library 
        Carnegie-Mellon University
        Emory University 
        Harvard University 
        Johns Hopkins University
        University of Michigan
        Massachusetts Institute of Technology
        New York University
        University of Tennessee, Knoxville
        University of Virginia
        University of Washington
        Yale University

These reports are rich in details of locally created collections,
publications, initiatives, and priorities and are an important way for
us to learn what is underway at member institutions.

Thanks to Michigan's continuing good graces in hosting them, the
Collections and Publications Registries that are extracted from the
newsletters are current except for some items in these most recent 12
submissions, and Christie is adding those to the databases that lie
behind the registries this week.

Work is about to start soliciting the spring 2005 reports from those who
report then.

2) ERA Update from NARA available 

Ken Thibodeau has provided us with a report -- "An Electronic Records
Archives (ERA) Update" -- to bring us up to date with the current state
of NARA's strategic response to the enormous electronic records
challenge that they face. 
http://www.diglib.org/preserve/ERA2004.htm   

3) DLF Scholars' Panel

The final version of the Report from the panel of scholars we convened
this summer is now online at http://www.diglib.org/use/scholars0406/.
These faculty members from the humanities and social sciences are all
actively building and manipulating content from our digital libraries,
and we brought them together to discuss what they want from digital
library services, and to show them some of the initiatives DLF is
working on.  

Discussion ranged widely over such topics as federated searching; mass
digitizing ambitions; institutional repositories; tools; shareable
metadata; courseware; the critical need for persistent identifiers;
digital preservation; online communities; the lack of professional
recognition for digital scholarship; and examples of scholarship that is
made possible by digital content and online authoring. 

The report clusters the main findings under the following headings: 

1) Barriers to Digital Scholarship 
2) The Need for Tools 
3) Services: Repositories and Harvestable Metadata 
4) Digital Library Collections  

This was a productive, satisfying, and lively first meeting.  The group,
or some variation of it, is likely to meet again in spring 2005.

Best, 

David