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2007-2008 Annual Report
Letter from the Chairperson
As we all face turbulent economic times, CLIR is stepping up its important role in helping us and our institutions look forward to shape the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. As this annual report attests, CLIR has made significant progress toward achieving the objectives it set in its ambitious three-year agenda for 2007-2010. Several exciting new efforts are under way in areas relating to cyberinfrastructure, preservation, the transformation of scholarly methodologies, the emerging library, and leadership. The CLIR Board and staff have also taken the opportunity to reflect on how to leverage the results of these efforts so they can add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Developing leaders is one of the most important things we can do, and one of the most significant legacies we leave. CLIR has invested heavily in leadership development—from the Frye Institute to the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Academic Libraries for Humanists, to the CLIR CIO Group, and the new Hidden Collections Program—that reaches into communities of graduate students, scholars, senior administrators, and library and IT leaders. To leverage these investments, CLIR President Chuck Henry and Presidential Fellow Elliott Shore are developing a "collegium" of these participants to "apply their collective experience and knowledge to real-world challenges and opportunities and to generate new research that will help institutions of higher education address some of the most daunting transformational challenges of the past 150 years."
CLIR's work would not be possible without the investments that several funding agencies have made in our vision. This year, CLIR received significant new funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the new Hidden Collections Program and a separate grant to examine the scholarly utility of large-scale digitization projects. CLIR also received new grants from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
In November 2008, CLIR will move from its home of the past 11 years to new offices a block south. There will be ample meeting space at the new address, and given the variety of activities planned in the year ahead, there will be plenty of opportunities to visit CLIR in its new location. We look forward to welcoming you!
Paula Kaufman
October 2008
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