This cite comes from the 06-17-11 issue of Current Cites.

Brogan, Martha L.. Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library  Washington, DC: Digital Library Federation, November 2006.(http://www.diglib.org/pubs/dlf106/). - This rather massive report (the PDF version runs 282 pages) covers a lot of ground. This is at it should be, since these days there are a very large number of potentially interesting digital library projects. But therein also lies the difficulty. Although the broad sweep that Brogan lays out for us is amazing in itself, it is deucedly difficult to draw any generalized conclusions from such an exercise. There are many threads of activity that are advancing at varying rates of speed and with sometimes parallel, sometimes congruent, and sometimes tangential arcs. Making sense of all this is perhaps an exercise in frustration, at least for those of puny intellect such as myself. Nope, probably best to look at it as a wild ride through an amazing array of interesting projects and glean from it what you can. My guess is that like the blind men encountering the elephant, our perception of this report will depend greatly on the part to which we affix our grasp. All of this should not be construed to be critical of the author -- this is clearly an achievement of monumental scale, to have looked both broadly and deeply at such a wide array of digital projects and emerged with an amazing portrait of where we are at this point in time. Full disclosure: a couple projects in which I am a participant or manager are highlighted. - RT