The Natural Resources Digital Library: Needs, Partners, and Challenges Janine Salwasser Natural Resources Consultant Oregon State University Bonnie Avery Natural Resources Librarian Oregon State University Janet Webster Associate Professor, Head Librarian-Guin Library Oregon State University In the year 2000 the Oregon Progress Boards State of the Environment Report noted that essential data, maps, and information on natural resources in the state are largely inaccessible, unusable or non-existent. Building on the land grant mission, the Oregon State University Libraries considered how best to build a natural resources digital library to address the need of planners, policy-makers, and researchers for access to high-quality, timely information to inform their decision-making and environmental stewardship. In 2001 the Libraries undertook a needs assessment to guide the development of a natural resources digital library and better define its content. Interviews with citizens, policy makers, and scientists showed that potential users want to find, retrieve, integrate, and synthesize well-organized and geo-referenced information in a wide variety of formats. Building partnerships as a means of addressing the users needs and promoting the development of a distributed information system will support the digital library goal of providing access to natural resource information at the local watershed, basin, statewide, and regional levels. This briefing will highlight three case studies (Virtual Oregon Data Clearinghouse, Willamette River Basin Explorer, and Tsunami Digital Library) that demonstrate the benefit of partnerships, the diversity of content, and the new digital library technologies employed—including spatial and non-spatial data cataloging, Web-enabled GIS, and collaborative filtering—by OSU Libraries to address the needs of different communities of users. With each of these case studies, we will share with the audience universal technological, economic, and social challenges to promote a continuing discussion that will move us towards collaborative and innovative solutions. Presentation: The Natural Resources Digital Library (PowerPoint)