criteria of scholarly value, and for such assessments deep knowledge of the research and curricular priorities in various disciplines is also needed. In their forthcoming book from the Oxford University Press, Fran Blouin, Head of Michigan’s Bentley Library, and Bill Rosenberg, a historian, analyze in detail the causes and consequences of the gulf in understanding that now exists between special collections librarians and scholars.24 I urge you to read it when it is available. We urgently need creative solutions. One way of gathering the deep scholarly knowledge needed to sort out priorities for special collection activity is to bring scholars and students directly into the special collections processing streams. Professor Jackie Goldsby is on the program of this meeting and will be speaking about pioneering efforts that she and her students have made with librarians and archivists at the University of Chicago and in the archives of various other institutions in and around Chicago. Mellon has funded similar initiatives at Columbia Johns Hopkins the University of California, Los Angeles and the Huntington Library. All the results are not in yet, but what we do know is very promising, with benefits all around for the scholars and students, the library, and the university. Contribution Mechanisms These programs illustrate one approach to the second fertile area of development for special collections to which I would draw attention: namely, finding efficient and productive ways to engage scholars and students in the development of special collections as scholarly resources. We have all heard about the Web 2.0 types of activities that try to draw readers in by adding tags or other forms of annotation to library records and surrogates. These are fascinating initiatives, but bringing scholars and students directly into the cataloging process is both more risky, and potentially more rewarding because of the deep engagement it can produce. Let me offer a few other examples to stimulate your thinking about how scholars and students could be productively engaged. The Medici Granducal Archive in Florence, Italy, has a treasure trove of information about the Italian Renaissance that is almost entirely unprocessed. The Medici Archive Project (MAP), an organization based in New York, regularly provides residential research fellowships for visiting scholars, and hit on the idea in 1999 to develop a scholar-friendly data-entry system and require its fellows to spend a portion of their time cataloging the files they were RLI 267 37 The Changing Role of Special Collections in Scholarly Communications ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC