Please add any ideas for possible MidWinter Discussion Forum topics. 

From Helene (June 17):  What about looking at collaboration between reference staff and IT staff to enhance electronic reference services or even develop new products?  Most programs dealing with IT and reference staff collaboration have focused on  the differences in culture and the difficulties to carry on projects.  Now that many libraries have switched to the model of an information commons where IT staff and reference librarians work together, we are finally seeing a lot of benefits from that collaboration.  At Santa Clara, we are in a new building and IT, Media Services, and the library have all merged together and we are exploring collaborative projects.  I would be very interested to learn more about what other people are doing.

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I haven't flushed this idea out all the way, but I've been thinking about what is now considered the archival copy of an article with electronic distribution. Especially in the science literature where the most recent version is online and a lot of publishers are allowing commenting/feedback to the articles. In the past the print version was considered the archival version, now what is the standard, has it changed, does it need to if it hasn't? Lots of possible discussion on this topic. (MS, 6/16/08)

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From Elliot (May 13) : A topic in the area of digital News Resources might be timely, with so many competing and overlapping and terribly expensive products out there. Approaches that could be taken:

• Historical news sources.
• Aggregated current news sources.
• From print media. From broadcast media.
• Free/open access sources versus products that cost money.
• Public domain (pre-1923) sources: potentially open access, but will they be in our lifetime?

Elliot, this is a good idea, we did something similar in 2005. You can find the info here: http://www.ala.org/ala/rusa/rusaourassoc/rusasections/mars/marssection/marscomm/2005dfprodserv.cfm

Think there is a way we can tie them together? (MS, 5/13/08)