Digitizing Special Collections: Shifting Gears

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Last Fri­day, Dan Linke, Don Thorn­bury, and I gave pre­sen­ta­tions report­ing on recent con­fer­ences and work­shops that we’ve attended. (See the pre­vi­ous post for Dan Linke’s elec­tronic records pre­sen­ta­tion.) My pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able here.

Rather than give a ses­sion by ses­sion review of the last few con­fer­ences I’ve attended or pre­sented at (the Soci­ety of Amer­i­can Archivists Annual Meet­ing, the Dig­i­tal Library Federation’s Fall Forum, and the Soci­ety of Geor­gia Archivists Annual Meet­ing), I decided to dis­cuss some of the more provoca­tive ideas from the OCLC/RLG Ser­vices’ report “Shift­ing Gears: Gear­ing Up to Get Into the Flow,” which addresses many issues rel­e­vant to archives, spe­cial col­lec­tions, and dig­i­tal libraries, both at Prince­ton and else­where. The report was inspired by the “Dig­i­ti­za­tion Mat­ters” forum held at SAA 2007. (Audio of the forum pre­sen­ta­tions is also avail­able online.)

Given some of the ongo­ing dis­cus­sion we’ve been hav­ing at Prince­ton, one of the most res­o­nant parts of the report for me is the por­tion related to descrip­tion, par­tic­u­larly the urg­ing to “take a page from archivists” and “stop obsess­ing about items.” As archivists, we have expe­ri­ence and exper­tise in describ­ing large (and small) col­lec­tions of mate­ri­als; we should make use of our abil­i­ties in this area and not limit our­selves to the item-level, bib­li­o­graphic cat­a­loging approach that has dom­i­nated dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, espe­cially since the major­ity of col­lec­tions we are dig­i­tiz­ing con­sist of unique and non-published mate­r­ial. Bill Lan­dis’ talk at the Dig­i­ti­za­tion Mat­ters forum dis­cusses this issue in greater detail.

For those inter­ested in more spe­cific infor­ma­tion about indi­vid­ual ses­sions, the SAA 2007 wiki and DLF’s con­fer­ence web­site have a num­ber of pre­sen­ta­tions up and avail­able. And as I men­tioned on Fri­day, any­one who missed Mark Greene’s pres­i­den­tial address at SAA’s clos­ing ple­nary ses­sion should read the text online.