The Advanced Research Initiative

The Emerging Library (ARIEL) at Rice University is based on the premise that the research library community must build a strong and lasting partnership with key academic professional societies, faculty, and other experts in order to better conceive and construct the next generation of library services, practices, and programs in support of a swiftly evolving academic environment.

The scope of ARIEL programs includes:

• Identifying and analyzing instances of disciplinary transformation by focusing on change as it is instantiated at the level of disciplines provides a existing structure within which to work while allowing access to those immediately involved in, and affected by, the shift in research and teaching
• Publishing web articles and related research on disciplinary change
• Exploring other online solutions that archive threads, family trees, stemma of ideas and innovation, and cross disciplinary relationships
• Hosting an annual conference on related subjects, and staging workshops at annual conferences
• commissioning papers and reports from the field
• Sharing an annual publication that describes and analyzes received data and reports
• serving as a peer review for other projects' architecture and protocols
• serving as a a testbed for new applications, code, products
• performing research into numerous aspects of digital library elements (software, applications, hardware benchmarks, complex systems architecture)
• linking to experts prominent in particular fields who can address some of the more intractable technical issues
• participating in spec development
• maintaining an archive on contemporary research on relevant digital library components
• conducting advanced research and documentation relevant to the larger questions of what a library is and is becoming