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In 2013, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a group of librarians from ARL’s Research Library Leadership Fellows program a planning grant to examine the center of excellence (CoE) model for information services. Used in a variety of industries, CoEs are designed to attract the most talented researchers in a particular field, enhance collaboration, and improve access to the resources needed for their research. The planning grant was awarded to determine whether the CoE model could serve as a means to provide the new services required for the effective use of digital information. This report describes the team’s approach to examining the feasibility of CoEs in the library setting. The team conducted preliminary investigations of more than 100 centers, which they narrowed to 35 for in-depth research. Interviews were conducted with staff at 19 centers and 7 funding organizations. In their conclusion, the team advises developing “networks of expertise” or “expert networks,” instead of CoEs, and provides a series of recommendations for building such networks.

This study examines the core infrastructure elements of systems that manage large quantities of digital materials that one would think of as a digital library. An examination of the infrastructures of a few make it possible to understand the diverse approaches each has taken to manage digital content. This study focuses on large, noncommercial digital libraries. Published in collaboration with CLIR’s Digital Library Federation program

The Idea of Orderexplores the transition from an analog to a digital environment for knowledge access, preservation, and reconstitution, and the implications of this transition for managing research collections. The volume comprises three reports. The first, “Can a New Research Library be All-Digital?” by Lisa Spiro and Geneva Henry, explores the degree to which a new research library can eschew print. The second, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” by Paul Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen, argues that from the perspective of long-term storage, digital surrogates offer a considerable cost savings over print-based libraries. The final report, “Ghostlier Demarcations,” examines how well large text databases being created by Google Books and other mass-digitization efforts meet the needs of scholars, and the larger implications of these projects for research, teaching, and publishing. The reports are introduced by Charles Henry; the volume includes a conclusion by Roger Schonfeld and an epilogue by Charles Henry.