About Asbat Digital Library

ASBAT Digital Library, a member-based library preserving educational, cultural and scholarly heritage in the interest of libraries, primary and secondary schools, universities and their patrons, bases its work on the following values. Our staff, leadership, and members of our governance bodies rely upon these principles to carry out ASBAT Digital Library’s work. Schools, government entities and NGOs who choose to support ASBAT Digital Library should do so with full awareness of our mission, vision, and values.

Mission

The mission of ASBAT Digital Library is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.

Vision

ASBAT Digital Library will be a vital catalyst for emerging forms of research, teaching, and learning that engage the scholarly and cultural records.

More specifically ASBAT Digital Library is organized to:

Trust is paramount, the basis of the preservation and stewardship mission we undertake on behalf of our community. We build trust through transparency, accountability, and consistent high-level execution of ASBAT Digital Library's mission.

Access to knowledge and open inquiry are necessary for just societies and for the creation of new scholarship and research. We use our position to promote the broadest possible access to the scholarly and cultural record today and into the future.

Equity, diversity, and inclusion promote justice, create communities that thrive, and advance collective knowledge and understanding. ASBAT Digital Library takes action to comprehend and address these inequities in our collections, services, programs, and organization.

Resilience, created through interdependent work, provides ASBAT Digital Library and the library community as a whole with flexibility and strength to address challenging opportunities in a changing system. ASBAT Digital Library develops this collective strength through our programs and services.

Our Objectives

We will;

To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive co-owned and co-managed digital archive of library materials converted from the print collections of the member institutions.
To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions, with a particular emphasis on ensuring access for individuals with print disabilities.
To develop cost-effective and robust infrastructure for digital content of value to scholars, the government and researchers, including a variety of formats and born-digital materials.
To develop partnerships and services that ensure preservation of the materials in ASBAT Digital Library and the entire print and digital scholarly record.
To reduce long-term capital and operating costs of storage and care of print collections through redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries.
To build infrastructure that facilitates cost-effective and productive collaborations among partnering institutions to reduce the cost of securing campus intellectual assets.
To define and make available a set of services that supports research using the ASBAT Digital Library corpus.
To create a technical framework that allows for both central and distributed creation of tools and services.
To sustain the ASBAT Digital Library enterprise as a “public good” while at the same time defining a set of services that benefits member institutions.