Saving a German Library as an interface between research and infrastructure

Among many other things, SUB Göttingen maintains the Göttingen Center for Retrospective Digitization (GDZ) [1] which hosts a very impressive collection of digitized documents. It seems that the managerial changes that prompted the open letter could pose a serious threat to the project.

[1] https://gdz.sub.uni-goettingen.de/

having worked with them for a few years, i'd say it's one of the most innovative library institutions and we (in the german speaking world and beyond) need them. they produced countless digital corpora and editions. largely historical of course, but high quality data.

This is the Boston Consulting Group hired by a mismanaged university in debt telling a library it should stop preserving/digitizing historical works and focus on it’s supposed main business of supplying (recent) literature to researchers. All while that library is a national leader in digitization projects.

(BCG is the consultancy per the linked-in-the-article blog post in german which also has a comment with some information about the (former?) mismanagement)

https://www.jmwiarda.de/2023/07/05/keine-ruhe-in-g%C3%B6ttin...

Glad to see quite a few people from my university's library (and surrounding services) on the supporter's list

I wonder how many innovations/systems are lost to history due to people changing incentives OR not understanding the depth of how incentives are structured. Without this open letter, it'd be hard to hear the other side. Most likely the changes would have been adopted...

Reading this encouraged me to think critically about things I work on.