Proponents of IRs now find that by aligning the goals of the IR with those of the underlying institution, there is no more battle to be fought. At HKU, the Senior Management Team has recently re-articulated the institution’s mission and vision statements, to focus on three themes; 1) Teaching & Learning, 2) Research, and 3) Knowledge Exchange (KE). The HKU definition of KE includes the act of making HKU generated knowledge and skill sets accessible to business, government and the community.

The “Taiwan e-Learning and Digital Archives Program” (TELDAP) was officially launched on January 1, 2008. TELDAP is aimed to digitize national cultural treasures, including archaeology, archives, artifacts, calligraphy and paintings, flora and fauna, rare books, and other cultural assets, to cultivate popular e-learning culture, to encourage innovation in e-learning research, and to lay a cornerstone for Taiwan’s e-learning and digital content industries

Being a small country of four million people at the end of the world has its advantages and disadvantages, where the six degrees of separation is often reduced to two. One positive is that “all of country” initiatives are much more manageable than in some larger countries, although budgets are considerably smaller. This presentation showcases some of those national digital and digitisation projects such as Matapihi, KRIS, Digital New Zealand and the National Digital Forum, discusses issues around heritage and indigenous content, and asks questions generally about the nature of collaboration both within the library community and across other sectors.

Ningbo Digital Library (NBDL) is the first joint digital library project across the three types of libraries in the nation, cosponsored by the three local government agencies, Bureau of Education, Bureau of Culture, Radio & TV, Press and Publication, and Bureau of Science & Technology. There are 18 individual libraries, including 16 academic libraries, 1 public library system (the city library and the subordinate public libraries at county and community levels) and 1 special library (the city information institute) join the project. The goal of the project is to digitize the local cultural, sci-tech, industrial and educational resources, integrate the born digital materials of the participating institutions and local enterprises, develop several special databases with local characteristics, establish a unified portal and serve the local industries, education and research institutions, and the citizens as well.

This presentation analyzes the nine-year experience of an academic digital library, e-Asia, which now holds over 4,000 items. In many respects, the e-Asia library is a long-running experiment. Yet the project is mature enough to provided lessons in what to do (and what not to do) when digital text is the focus of collection building. Unlike traditional libraries where, over time, books migrate to and from their shelves, digital libraries hold content that remains relatively immobile while it is the digital “shelves” that change and migrate over time.