Closing remarks by Clifford Lynch at the ARL-C&I Ball Forum, October 2011. I was asked to give just a few minutes of sort of reflection and synthesis about what we've been hearing over the past 24 hours or so. And I'm going to try and do that in about five, not more than 10 minutes. I think probably we won't do any Q&A after because we do need to get everybody out of here. Before I start that, I want to just mention a couple of housekeeping things. We changed the format of the forum around a bit this year and we would welcome your comments on the evaluation forms about how well that worked. We are also going to be putting PowerPoint slides and recordings of the presentations up shortly on the ARL website. And I'll put something out to the CNI Announce List when that's ready and I believe ARL will make a similar announcement. But those should be wonderful resources for folks back at your institution. So let me turn to kind of reflect on this. I think that part of the motivation for putting this together and focusing on 21st century collections was a sense that we've had a number of events over the past few years that have really focused in on specific parts of the collection, how they're changing the implications of technology, the implications of evolving scholarly practice for those things. So we've looked at data intensive scholarship and ESI ads. We've looked at special collections and how those are becoming more and more central in various ways. We've looked at what's happening in the traditional journal world and some of the pricing and refereeing and other activities that are shifting around there. But ultimately you have to sort of put this all together into a portfolio. You have to figure out how to allocate resources among them. You have to figure out where you can implement common infrastructure to support multiple kinds of collections. How to really achieve the right balance for your mission and your scholars. And I think that was the kind of question we were really hoping to frame through this symposium. I think you saw a lot of very interesting and important points along the way. Certainly one of the things that's very clear is that global materials are going to continue to be important and that they're going to shift in new ways. We heard for example about how global collecting now was starting to incorporate new cultural objects, video materials, national web presences, things of that nature. And how we're seeing this sort of pattern of collaboration with endangered archives. The Yemen project that was described and there are a whole series of other similar activities that have gone on. I think those all point to the future. Rick Luce made a chilling statement which I believe is absolutely accurate. Which is that it won't be long until we look back at the Rushdie collection at Emory and say those were the good old days of personal collections. What's coming in terms of personal collections is going to be hugely challenging as we move away. We're always sort of looking in the rear view mirror there but as we move away from the sort of legacy of the 80s and the 90s, actual physical storage devices and take on the net and the cloud and social interaction sites as a part of people's trail through the world. It really is going to challenge us in really profound ways. I think that this morning we were reminded about some of the real complexities of mass digitization and how that is important but is not a panacea. How it interrelates to our physical collections in really complicated ways. Paul's comments about additions, for example, sort of understanding the spans of time represented in our collection. The need for really good metadata for digitized collections was all extremely salient and I think there's a lot to think about there. I think that this description of the sort of limits of the search box was really important. You lose so much context there. You don't know what's not in the database that's being searched. I mean I love the description of the patent database that just happened to be missing 7,000 trademarks. Now, unless you know what you're doing already, you don't know what's not there. These are things we have to be really, really mindful about. I'm just going to make two other really sort of broader comments. I actually believe that we're facing a emerging crisis as we look at the masses of digital material that are being created often in the consumer world rather than in the scholarly world. The Twitter archive, for example. These are going to be really important evidentiary collections that will underlie scholarship in the future. As you try and understand what's going on in the society, how news and rumor propagate, we're going to need to ensure that scholars today and tomorrow have access to these evidence bases. Twitter is just one example of many and they're not all social sites. You may have noticed that a lot of the financial markets are getting very unstable right now and people don't understand what's going on there. They're going to be studying that for the next 20 years and actually the data demands for understanding that are absolutely staggering. We have very little handle on it. I won't go on about observational science very much, but that's another example here as well. The question of how we collectively ensure that this evidentiary material continues to be available I think is a very key part of the puzzle going forward. The last theme that I want to just underscore and actually it sort of reemerged beautifully in the last two sessions in sequence is one of collaboration. We know that collections in the 21st century are going to be collaborative. I believe they're going to be collaborative along at least three axes. One is that they are going to involve collaboration among libraries. Libraries are going to I think shrink and become more systematic in their dealing with the mass print collections or their successors. The journals that everybody gets, the e-books that everybody gets. There's going to be more emphasis on unique materials and trying to allocate out responsibility for those unique materials in a rational way to share them and to interconnect them is going to be very crucial. NDIP is a wonderful example of how that discussion has moved forward. There are many others. We certainly touched on that in some of the discussions about global collection. The second axis of course is that these collections are going to increasingly be collaborations with scholars. As libraries move into what you could call I guess the publishing business or the dissemination business or the stewardship role and engage the outputs, the products of their institutions, faculty more deeply. These are going to take on aspects of collaborative collections. Then as we had that marvelous example from Iowa, we're also I think going to see collections become collaborations with students, with the public, with people around the world. As we see these sort of crowdsourced annotations, translations, transliterations, there are many, many examples of that and a number of them were mentioned in that presentation. I think that that's going to be a third and really new but very important access of collaboration because of the linkages it will build up with the broader society. I think the last session really framed in a very pointed way the question of how do we frame collaborations, how do we sell them, how do we gain support for them. The question of how we position collaboration versus competition among institutions and I think there's a growing sense that 21st century collections really are more collaborative than they are competitive. But in an environment of great financial stress, as we heard, that is a delicate thing to bring forward to institutional leadership. So that's clearly an area that I think emerges from this as one that we need to think very strategically about. So those are a few fast reflections that I've had in listening to this. I take great heart in the statement that the long tail of collections is alive and well that was made yesterday. I think it's very important that that long tail stay alive and well and I think we've seen a number of really compelling examples of things that are being done in that area. So I thank you for joining us for this symposium. I hope it has been helpful to you and I wish you safe travels home. Thanks. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org.