Public comments on Ithaka S+R FDLP Modeling draft documents

Starting today and continuing for the next few days, we will be posting comments here on the first three documents from the Ithaka S+R FDLP Modeling Project.

• Background (final draft)
• Environmental Scan (final draft)
• DRAFT White Paper on Existing Library Networks

Ithaka S+R is now moving forward to the analysis phase of the contract. We thank Ithaka S+R for their work so far and hope that our readers will make the time to read through the drafts and also give their comments to the Ithaka S+R team.

The three Ithaka S+R documents are largely descriptive rather than evaluative and will inform the recommendations from Ithaka S+R, which will come later. In our comments on these documents we will draw some conclusions and attempt to find meaning in the overview that Ithaka S+R has provided. Our comments will be informed by our daily work in both the physical and digital realms of government information.

We will address questions such as:

• What approaches to government information in the digital age are succeeding and what approaches are failing?
• How can libraries lead and create their own future?
• What can we learn from users?
• What can we learn from the history of the FDLP that applies to our current environment?
• Will the FDLP help or hinder libraries?

For those that are interested (or masochistic :-)), attached and linked here is a PDF of our notes in stream of consciousness on the current drafts. We used Pirate Pad to collaboratively take notes and discuss issues. We’ve sent these to the Ithaka S+R project team — but don’t say we didn’t warn you ;-).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.