David
Seaman
Executive Director, Digital Library Federation1755 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20036
Telephone: 202-939-4762 Fax: 202-939-4765
David Seaman has been the Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) since 2002. DLF is a consortium of major academic libraries -- with member institutions currently from the United States and Great Britain -- who collaborate to identify standards and "best practices" for digital collections and network access; to coordinate leading-edge research-and-development in libraries' use of electronic-information technology; and to incubate projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop individually http://www.diglib.org.
Mr. Seaman joined the DLF from the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, where he was the founding Director (1992-2002). In this role, he oversaw the creation and development of an online archive of XML and SGML texts, of which many are available in multiple e-book formats. In 2002, Mr. Seaman has lectured and published extensively in the fields of humanities computing and digital libraries, and since 1993 has taught e-text and internet courses at the annual summer Book Arts Press Rare Book School at Virginia. Mr. Seaman gained a BA in English studies from the University of East Anglia, Norwich in 1984 and an MA from the University of Connecticut in 1986, and has an unfinished PhD dissertation from graduate study at the University of Virginia (1986-1992).
| Keynote Mass and Malleability: the Collaboration Imperative. |
-- October 15, 2004 8:45 am - 9:45 am |
Libraries exhibit a deep-seated belief in the imperative nature of collaboration -- of librarians and our institutions' faculty and students; of librarians one with another across institutions; of libraries with related industries; and of collaborative digital library objects themselves, working together across collections in machine-aided working spaces.
Many of our current delights, possibilities, and frustrations are bound up with collaborative failures and successes; often, our sense of what we could do is thwarted by content that fails us in our desire to discover it quickly, bend it to our purposes, and engage actively with it. Much more content, and much richer, domain-sensitive, finding systems are vital, as is the ability to enrich, re-shape, re-package, annotate, and contextualize the data once we have found it. This presentation will chart the course of current developments in digital library best practices, policies, and technical developments as we craft the libraries, users, and digital content we want to achieve to move us beyond the buzz and hype.