18 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 296 2018 interested, engaged, reliant upon, or willing to help to continually devise, implement, and improve solutions in response to ongoing technological change.” An emerging combination of technologies transforms the ways in which content is created, how research is done, how we learn, and how knowledge is taught. Distributed digital practice, as we build it, will enable us to curate and preserve the results of this transformation and to leverage the capabilities to improve and advance our own practice. We cannot succeed at distributed digital practice if we do not embrace radical collaboration. Building (an Inclusive) Community We have organizational tools available from developing previous generations of digital practice that can help us become an inclusive community actively and successfully engaged in distributed digital practice. The stages of an organizational maturity model—a community being a type of organization—can help. Common stages of organizational maturity model:12 1. Acknowledge: understanding that this is a local concern 2. Act: initiating projects 3. Consolidate: transitioning from projects to programs 4. Institutionalize: incorporating larger environment rightsizing programs 5. Externalize: embracing inter-institutional collaboration and dependency When we transition to a new generation of practice, the starting point is acknowledging that there is an unmet challenge as individuals, as organizations, as a community. This acknowledgment leads to the need and desire to act, generally in the form of a project—the number of distributed digital practice projects is increasing rapidly, for example, machine learning and artificial intelligence are everywhere.
Previous Page Next Page