TULIP at the University Of Michigan

Taken in their ideal sense, digital libraries provide their users with access to the desired information regardless of its medium and without the constraints of time or place associated with conventional libraries. Moreover, digital libraries enable personalized information harvesting and management so that their users can develop their own ways of viewing and collecting the information. Achieving this vision of the digital library offers major challenges for today's publishers, librarians, and technologists necessitating a variety of pilot projects through which components can be developed and experience can be gained. This article considers the driving forces, issues, and lessons learned by the University of Michigan in implementing TULIP (The University Licensing Program), a research collaboration to build digital libraries.