Success with academic digital projects was the general theme of a Washington University visit by David Seaman on May 3-4, 2005. Seaman was founding director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, home to humanities texts and images available on the Internet. Seaman is currently Director the Digital Library Federation, a consortium of major academic libraries identifying standards and best practices for digital collections. He has published and lectured on humanities computing and digital libraries.

Seaman made presentations to groups of faculty and librarians and met with several groups including the Dean's Council of University Libraries and the advisory for the Humanities Digital Workshop in Arts & Sciences. A recurring theme in Seaman's remarks was that "seismic" events are occurring in technology and information access. Among these are Google's initiative to digitize book holdings of major libraries and the Google satellite map search service. Embracing the notion that an individual or institution simply cannot get ahead of the tide of change, Seaman said, can free us to think about tools that fit with the specific needs of faculty for scholarship and libraries for preservation and access.

Seaman noted that we need tools for scholarship and teaching that allow searching, gathering, annotating, visualizing, authoring and publishing, and that few tools do all these functions well. Faculty needs in humanities are moving toward an integrated landscape with malleable content. These may cut across library collection priorities and policies.

For libraries, the critical issues have moved from limiting and controlling access to adding value with service and convenience, along with saving staff and patron time.

Examples of initiatives in the development of digital scholarly tools cited by Seaman include:

• University of Virginia Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

• George Mason University Center for History and New Media

• The Scholar's Box at University of California Berkeley

• Greenstone digital library collection tool

A copy of Seaman's presentations slides is available at http://digital.wustl.edu/contributing.html. David Seaman's visit was sponsored by University Libraries and Arts & Sciences.

by Judy Fox, Associate Dean, University Libraries

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