Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library.

Soon, it will be possible to view a high-quality image of a 7th- century Chinese Buddha held by the Sackler Museum and, at the same time, study photographs held by the Fine Arts Library, documenting the expedition that discovered the statue. Imagine also that these images are linked to textual histories of the statue or its time period, bibliographies on Asian art prepared by Harvard faculty members, and catalogs of related materials held in other Harvard libraries.

A major project being led by the Harvard University Library will make all of this possible and allow new exploration of the relationships among the collections owned and held by the libraries, museums, and archives at Harvard and Radcliffe.

"The Harvard University Library Digital Initiative [LDI] is a large-scale program -- $12 million over five years -- to develop the University's capacity to acquire, organize, deliver, and archive digital resources," said Sidney Verba, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library.

"It continues our efforts to make digital information accessible to our users, to use digitization to enhance access to our traditional collections, and to develop a community of highly skilled library and computing professionals," said Verba. "Harvard's library has been the world's leading academic research library in the era of paper, with over three centuries of experience in shelving, cataloging, circulating, and preserving books and other print materials. Digital information provides a new and greater challenge. It also provides exciting opportunities to explore relationships among the current collections in new ways, and to continue our preeminent position in the new digital age."

The Library Digital Initiative involves coordination and collaboration across and among many departments in the University and has the following goals:

• To enable libraries to reduce the complexity inherent today in making digital research materials available to users, and

• To ensure that the University's digital collections are as well organized and accessible to library users as its traditional collections.

Harvard's libraries have been acquiring digital materials for some time, said Dale Flecker, associate director of the University Library for systems and planning. "The University's decentralization, however, means that in the natural course of things these separate acquisitions may involve overlapping or uncoordinated solutions to the technical and organizational challenges of digital collections," Flecker said. "The LDI will address these issues in a general, sophisticated, and coordinated way."

Said Allan Brandt, professor of the history of science and Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine, "The Digital Initiative marks the effort of the University libraries to develop programs that will take advantage of revolutionary changes wrought by the digitization of information. As a historian, I have been remarkably impressed by the new possibilities and opportunities for accessing previously unavailable materials from the widest range of times and places. The LDI is especially eager to work with faculty to ensure that the Library keeps pace in the digital era in supporting both teaching and scholarship."

The LDI is guided by a steering committee composed of librarians and scholars from across the University, and chaired by Nancy M. Cline, Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College. In developing the proposal for the Initiative, the committee acknowledged the many exciting developments unfolding in the electronic information arena and the importance of optimizing these developments for the students and scholars of Harvard. However, the committee also emphasized that the University has existing traditional collections of enormous significance, and will continue for the foreseeable future to collect new materials in traditional formats.

"The significance of the LDI lies in the fact that it does not seek to create a digital library that exists independently of our existing collections, but rather that it aims to enrich the current collections by integrating a variety of media: electronic bibliography, visual images, data sets, graphics, and text," said Peter Bol, professor of Chinese history and a member of the LDI grants committee.

"The long-term benefit of the LDI goes beyond enhanced access to a greater wealth of resources," Bol said. "It provides an opportunity for users and scholars to use the collections in different ways and also to add to the collections through the creation of finding aids, electronic bibliographies, and other materials that may not have been traditionally collected by libraries."