The Advantages of Collaboration

By collaboratively converting the catalogs at each center library to a standardized format and combining them into an on-line union catalog, indexing inaccessible journals and other unique materials, selectively creating digital full-text, image, and sound resources from important locally-accessible foreign print materials, and disseminating all this content on the Internet, the centers, CAORC, and the University of Utah are providing a major service to international education in the United States and abroad. In the process the program strengthens internal control of the centers' collections and increases access to research materials on site. In the process, the DLIR program, with the aid of the Library of Congress' Cairo Office and the American University in Cairo, has also undertaken a modest program training overseas center librarians in modern methods of bibliographic control and collection maintenance, and also helps search out other training opportunities for center librarians.

The DLIR program facilitates Internet access to the catalogs of major area studies collections housed abroad and is part of a long-term mechanism of cooperation among the centers and the institutions in America that depend upon them. It encourages leveraging of private support for a program funded in part by the federal government with one-time costs made economical by coordination.

DLIR helps scholars identify materials in need of preservation and move toward a rational plan for the preservation and dissemination of foreign information resources and important research materials.

The DLIR program is creating an infrastructure which can both attract new collaborative partners with unique content to provide for mainstream international access, and also serve as a model for other interregional efforts at digital library development. It stimulates intra-country and interregional collaboration and provides the infrastructure necessary for developing and implementing collaborations with host country libraries, archives, and collections that will add immeasurably to the value of the electronic information network in responding to the nation's educational needs in foreign area and language studies.

The DLIR program represents an ambitious undertaking on the part of CAORC and its member centers, but there is no desire to duplicate existing resources or to duplicate databases that may become available through other programs. DLIR is committed to cooperating with other projects and consortial approaches to improving scholarly access to international information, such as the Digital South Asia Library, the Center for Research Libraries, and the Global Resources Network. As appropriate, processing and presentation of individual collections or archives can be pursued as a distributed effort; but materials so treated will be accessible to all related projects through links.

Last updated: December 7, 2004

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