In the plenary session on the first day of the workshop, Y.T. Chien of the NSF stressed the importance of strategic partnership--private, public, and international--to give synergy to digital library research. In order to build and deploy information and knowledge work environments, it was pointed out, coinvestment is required.
Partners will help share the cost of research in a variety of ways. Some will provide funding; others may bring their own expertise as an in-kind contribution. And yet others may bring existing collections, authentic users, and a valuable understanding of real-world problems to the table. As one put it, there should be "diverse ways of participating."
All natural types of collaborations and cofunding opportunities should be encouraged to meet research objectives. Some problems, like solving multilingual and multicultural access challenges, by their nature suggest certain types of collaboration (e.g., with initiatives in Europe or Asia). Some types of collections (e.g., images, space data, geographic information) suggest involvement of NASA, European Space Agency, National Agricultural Library or others. Some private foundations may help fund and encourage subjects beyond the traditional science/engineering (e.g. arts and humanities to do digital library research). Other foundations might invest in the exploration of digital libraries in education of youth as well as life-long learning of adults. summary, cofunding to meet research objectives and increase leveraging of federal dollars is highly desirable.
At the workshop, several possible partners were represented, these included
Among those agencies potentially interested in joint-agency initiatives and sharing the costs of research with the NSF and participating institutions, people suggested DARPA and NASA (which had both been involved in DLI), and NIH. It was also hoped that private foundations might be willing to participate, especially in socially relevant application domains.
Participants also suggested agencies and institutions with collections of their own that might be interested in partnering research centers in continuing research. These included:
It was clearly recognized that research will need cooperation among many fields. These would include