Charles Henry
President
CLIR
Stephen Rhind-Tutt
President and CEO
Coherent Digital
Wayne Graham
Chief Information Officer
CLIR
Carol Mandel
University Librarian Emerita
New York University; CLIR
Christian Dupont
Associate University Librarian
Boston College
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Coherent Digital LLC (CD) have developed a partnership to greatly expand capacities for sustained and useful access to endangered resources, both through digitization and through the capture of culturally valuable digital-only content. The initial joint project is Hidden Collections (HC) Africa, an initiative designed to identify, digitize, catalog, and make accessible rare, important, and endangered resources of African cultural heritage in response to climate change, political disruption, and legacies of colonialism’s biased neglect. CD was developed as a corporation guided by ideas and principles espoused by CLIR: equity of access, the right to affordable knowledge, and the right to participate in one’s culture. This partnership strives to enhance our capacity to learn and interpret the world as an aspect of social justice. These shared principles inform the HC Africa project. The panel will discuss the genesis of the partnership, both its technical and behavioral/social goals and methods, its long-term sustainability, and the implications for similar partnerships within and beyond the CNI community.
