Since 2000 National Science Digital Library (NSDL) projects and partners have demonstrated multiple ways to provide high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning. This year’s NSDL Annual Meeting promises to highlight even more of these ongoing cyberlearning initiatives that in total have increased the educational value of national investment in digital library initiatives. Global institutional library and archive communities are interested in what NSDL has learned over the last eight years–how to effectively re-purpose both technology and information for K16 educational audiences.

Fedora Commons is one such knowledge community. More than half of the Fedora Commons global community of users and developers are from large international, public or academic libraries and archives. As a member of the Fedora Commons community NSDL is one of many organizations that rely on Fedora Commons open source repository software to create an underlying architecture for systems like NCore, the suite of technologies and standards that are a framework for NSDL’s digital library infrastructure.

The authors of The Academic Library in a 2.0 World (1), a research bulletin published by EducauseConnect, have suggested that libraries will increasingly be called on to prove their value to learning, teaching, and research by demonstrating tangible outcomes and evolving their structures, processes, services, and staff roles to accommodate the changes occurring in publishing and communication.

NSDL-writ-large has developed expertise in re-purposing and delivering institutional knowledge for teaching and learning since 2000. Partnering with NSDL projects is one answer to how libraries and archives in many parts of the world might begin to address an outreach mission that is new to some of them.

As one UK institutional archivist and librarian once said to me, “The idea that we should be in the business of marketing, creating new products, and providing open access to what’s inside of formerly well-guarded fortresses of knowledge is new for some of us.”

Take Oxford, for example.

Recently Sarah Thomas, The 26th Bodleian Librarian (that would be 26th over the last 9 centuries), and Director of Oxford University Library Services at Oxford University, addressed former colleagues at Cornell University about the differences between what she described as Oxford’s very old institutional library system (900 years, 10,000 medieval manuscripts, and four Magna Cartas) and Cornell’s “young” library system (about 150 years, one Magna Carta and a handful of medieval manuscripts). I was struck by the vast cultural differences she described between these two venerable library systems located across an ocean from one another, but with the same closely held ideals for institutional support of scholarship and learning.

The University of Oxford is rich in daily academic ritual among well-known buildings designed by early architects like Sir Christopher Wren. Time is even reckoned differently. Three-month long “terms”—Michaelmas Term, Hilary Term, and Trinity Term create a scholarly pace of life where many students and faculty ride bikes from place to place, and is in tune with the idea of quiet study over long periods. Academic ritual at American universities is more likely to involve loud music, multi-tasking, media and access to online social networks that change at the speed of a keystroke.

The 30,000 external and 60,000 internal Oxford registered “readers”, who we might understand as “users”, like printed materials, a lot. Many of Oxford’s library systems deliver physical books to people who are in library buildings because almost no one is allowed to take a book out of one of Oxford’s many libraries, and yet because Oxford is a UK legal depository (a copy of every publication, electronic and other non-print material are required by law to be deposited in a national library to ensure that this information is available for future generations). Thomas feels an obligation to people throughout the UK to make Oxford’s valuable knowledge resources more accessible. A small percentage of Oxford’s collections are digitized and internet access is not always available on campus. She is committed to making the needs of users, and readers, a part of the Oxford Libraries’ tradition in the future.

She concluded with the question, “How do we go forward and benefit from this remarkable past?”

Part of the answer lies in Fedora-based projects at Oxford like Forced Migration Online (FMO), a project coordinated by a team based at the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford Department of International Development (QEH), University of Oxford. FMO aims to give comprehensive information in an impartial environment and to promote increased awareness of human displacement issues to an international community of users.

To find out more about the Fedora Commons community of libraries and archives in some surprising places and cultures worldwide come to “Fedora Commons Educational Repository Projects” at NSDL’s Annual Meeting, October 1, from 3:30-4:00 p.m. in the Capital Room, Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington. D.C.

(1) Wawrzaszek, Susan, and David G. Wedaman. “The Academic Library in a 2.0 World” (Research Bulletin, Issue 19). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.