Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Making Sense of Digital Content Management Lee Watkins, Jr. Assistant Dean of University Libraries The Johns Hopkins University Like many universities, Johns Hopkins is beginning to work toward a vision of a comprehensive "institutional repository" of digital intellectual assets. However, both preceding and contemporaneous with this unifying effort an often bewildering variety of initiatives that might be characterized as "digital content management" have proliferated. While each initiative responds to related needs, and each is laudable in its own right, they are largely being pursued by separate groups with different agendas and would likely lead to separate solutions that have little hope of interoperating with each other or with the "institutional repository" that should be the permanent and authoritative source of their content objects. In effect, these projects are the "trees" that prevent us from seeing the entire content management "forest." The objective of this session is to "paint the whole elephant" of digital content management across the spectrum of our activities, in order to encourage strategic thinking about these matters, and describe an evolving strategic approach to digital content management.