 Opening session of the ARL-C&I Fall Forum, October 2011. Welcoming remarks by Winston Tabb and Carton Rogers. We can take your seats, I know we're a little bit crowded because we've added some people from where we had before, but just find a seat and we'd like to get started because we want to have plenty of time for both presentations and the discussions. So now I say good afternoon everyone. Winston Tabb, the incoming new president of ARL as a few hours ago and also the Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at Johns Hopkins. So send that role as the president of ARL that I'm so happy to welcome all of you here today to this forum that's focused on 21st century collections and the urgency of collaborative action. In recent years ARL and CNI have themselves collaborated in organizing these forums around issues that have arisen out of the ongoing strategic planning process within ARL. And also we wanted to do this to encourage participation by our directors in these forums but also to have even more interaction between the directors and some of our senior staff and so we have organized these as kind of complimentary meetings following right on the annual ARL membership meeting in the fall which just concluded a few hours ago. So today's forum as I say is focused on these 21st century collections and most particularly on the collaborative part of those and with that I'm happy to turn the podium over to my colleague Carton Rogers who is the Dean of Libraries at the University of Pennsylvania but also the chair of our transforming research libraries steering committee which is the main under whose auspices this is being convened. So thank you. Thank you Winston. Thanks Winston. I am indeed Carton Rogers. I have to go through my script here and I am the vice provost and director of libraries at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm also currently the chair of the transforming research libraries steering committee which is one of the three strategic committees functioning under the ARL banner. It's under the auspices of my committee that this forum is being held today. The forum is based on a task group that works with TRL. It's the task force on 21st century research library collections. You have a document in your program created by the task force that describes a landscape of assumptions about the future of collections in research libraries. We are pleased to have an esteemed group of speakers for the forum who will address a number of issues identified in these assumptions. We know that we need to redefine what collections look like. We also know that print collections are critical to the research enterprise. The number of libraries engaged in efforts to create shared print repositories for monographs and journals is growing fast. Changes in scholarly publishing may mean that in the not too distant future e-books will be the standard format for monographs in much the same way print journals have given way to digital journals. Libraries are wrestling with ways to create, manage and preserve digital resources and we have to figure out how to store them. Best practices are emerging but are not shared or practiced as widely as they might be. All the struggle with born digital materials. Libraries are figuring out how to reshape their staff and organizations to manage this endeavor. How many of us work in organizations where the organizational model and the budget allocations have shifted in the same way that our collection budgets have shifted from supporting print to digital. Libraries know very well how to collaborate but not necessarily on the collection challenges with the highest priorities today. Everyone in the collection's food chain must think differently about how we collect materials for our libraries how we make them accessible to our users how we preserve them for the future and perhaps most importantly how we partner with other libraries. The forum will not attempt to provide all the answers to our questions. What forums do? We do hope that the speakers you hear this afternoon and tomorrow morning will stimulate your thinking and fortify you with ideas to take back to your organization. We also hope that our discussions will help us collectively define a roadmap for what we need to do as a community and identify where we can and should take collaborative action. Before we begin, I do want to thank a number of people who have been involved in putting this forum together. I know. Most particularly Deborah Jacobs sitting here telling me to be careful with the laptop that's in front of me. So let me thank Christine Avery, Sue Boffman, the aforementioned Deborah Jacobs, and Kenny and Tom Leonard for planning the forum. I think it would also be appropriate if I introduced the members of the Task Force on 21st century research library collections. This is so that you can buttonhole them at the reception later this afternoon and ask them the questions that you're too polite to ask in a public forum like this. The members in the audience, I hope they're here. If you're here, would you stand so people recognize you? Chris Avery, Sharon Farb, Tom Hickerson, Deborah Jacobs, Tom Leonard, Rick Loos, Greg Rasky, and Jay Schaefer. So I really appreciate all of their efforts in support of this very important work that the 21st century collections task group is engaged in. So thank you all again for coming here on a Thursday afternoon and being part of this very important forum. We hope you find the new format useful. We hope to get you all out of here by noon tomorrow. And so I also, I guess, want to say one thing. I hope you're all open to the concept of more collaboration because I really do think it's critical to our futures. And I hope that the speakers that you hear over the next day and a half will convince you of that. So with that, let me introduce my good colleague, Deborah Jacobs, who is the Rita D. Holloway University Librarian and Vice Provost for Library Affairs at Duke University. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org.