OUR VISION AND MISSION
Vision. A "world-class Library for a world-class University" requires access to a universe of knowledge that includes a variety of resources in multiple formats. It requires services that encourage users to locate, manipulate, analyze, and employ existing information in order to create new learning and to devise new scholarly communications. And it especially requires participation in local, national, and international initiatives to preserve and provide access to information that otherwise might be lost.
The Georgetown University Digital Library will create new opportunities: to integrate traditional research support and new digital resources to serve our local, national, and international constituencies; to impart a strategic advantage for the University's centers of excellence; to educate and support the next generation of faculty, staff, and student leaders; and to engage the campus communities in new ways to meet the critical missions of Georgetown University.
Mission. The Georgetown University Digital Library, a partnership among all of Georgetown's libraries and a collaboration with University Information Services and the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, supports the advancement of education and scholarship at Georgetown and contributes to the expansion of research initiatives, both nationally and internationally. By providing the infrastructure, resources, and services, the Georgetown University Digital Library sustains the evolution from the traditional research models of today to the enriched scholarly communication environment of tomorrow, and it provides context and leadership in developing collaborative opportunities with partners across the campus and around the world.
The Georgetown University Digital Library will achieve its mission by:
1. Assembling, organizing, and maintaining access to a wide variety of digital information, collections, databases, and services;
2. Creating the infrastructure to enable the University to manage and create content that will emphasize its unique and emerging academic initiatives;
3. Working with faculty, staff, and students to create new content, thus strengthening the University's academic programs and providing a showcase for materials produced at Georgetown;
4. Promoting standards, best practices, and open systems to ensure interoperability, integration, and enduring access to digital information resources;
5. Incorporating well-designed, integrated access to legacy formats in order to encourage full use of the existing scholarly content by a digitally-oriented population;
6. Creating new service models in the digital environment;
7. Preserving both print-based and born-digital information by maintaining institutional repositories of digital content produced at Georgetown and by generating digitally-reformatted information for extended storage and dissemination; and
8. Fostering strategic partnerships for digital library development with collaborators in the scholarly and research communities worldwide.
Last updated: 1/13/04
KEY PROJECT DOCUMENTS
Resource Selection Policy (4/14/05) presents the objectives, scope, guidelines, and criteria for selection and removal of resources for the repository of Digital Georgetown.
Metadata Guidelines (10/26/05) The Metadata
Guidelines present the metadata standards and practices
for Digital Georgetown.
