This article summarizes the discussions of the DELOS/NSF Working Group that reviewed current research and existing practice to better understand the ways in which actors and their roles are perceived within the digital library community. Definitions given to new roles depend too often on the narrow, subjective perspective of a local context. The current situation makes it difficult to understand objectively the key actor/role issues that arise in individual cases and also to perform comparative analysis between different cases. This work brings to light several issues that warrant further research and underscores the community’s need for formal and objective reference models for the description of actors and their roles in digital libraries.