There is a lot of work still to be done technically and socially. Issues of copyright protection, fair use, and the ability to license museum images are currently hotly debated. Several thousand images with contextual material have been digitized in an increasingly integrated process and are being used by students and teachers on the seven campuses. The project has already taught many unpredictable lessons on how such different institutions can work together. Mediation also needs to occur within sectors, and within institutions as our broad working landscape is being transmuted by electronic networking.
Libraries are clearly in the early days of transforming their own roles and identities.
Peter Lyman, University Librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, has perhaps best described the dynamic currents effecting the transformation. Libraries will become more actively involved in the process of teaching and learning as, with the Internet's ability to supply primary documents with ease, education becomes more extensively like research, with greater opportunities for collaborative discovery replacing the rehearsal of the contents of inert textbooks. The Role of ARL and ARL Libraries Innovation is a social and cultural phenomenon, not a technological one. With much technical work to be done, the cultural community needs a strong and broad vision of itself and its needs in this area to be able to articulate and command what it wants, rather than riding sidecar to the main show. Association of Research Libraries.