Digital Collecting

A summary of Ricky Erway's , Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research, lightning talk session at SAA 2014 in Washington DC on August 16. The premise was that many archives have received materials in forms that they cannot even read. Archives are acquiring born-digital content at increasing rates and it’s hard enough to keep up with current formats. It makes sense to reach out to the community for help with more obscure media. I found ten speakers who had confronted this problem and figured out innovative solutions to getting material into a form that could be more easily managed.

Abstract:

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery, and the Catalog: Scale, Workflow, Attention" by Lorcan Dempsey discusses the position of the catalog and uses it to illustrate more general discovery and workflow directions for libraries. There is a renaissance of interest in the catalog and catalog data. Yet it comes at a time when the catalog itself is being reconfigured in ways which may result in its disappearance as an individually identifiable component of library service.

Caroline Brazier of the British National Library describes the recent evolution of the British Library’s collection development strategy and policies, to show how one of the largest research library collections in the world is making the transition to digital collecting. She also discusses how they are changing what they collect in core areas such as commercial publishing, new web-based media and heritage collections.

IFLA Library - When the University of Illinois Library began development of its digital preservation repository system, Medusa, the library found that there were many audio-visual resources that had yet to be cataloged, i.e. inaccessible to users. In order to make resources available to end-users and comply with Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model, the library developed an ingestion package that includes descriptive metadata.

CollectiveAccess is a highly configurable cataloguing tool and web-based application for museums, archives and digital collections. Available free of charge under the GPL open-source license, it requires little to no custom programming to support a variety of metadata standards, external data sources and repositories, as well as most popular media formats. In addition to multilingual cataloguing facilities, it allows publication of this data in the languages of your choice.

Welcome to Resources Anonymous, the support group for librarians addicted to information overload and teachers trying to stay up to speed on the Common Core Curriculum. One dirty secret of librarianship is that some of us still measure our worth by the quantity of resources we amass and disburse. But in this age of information abundance, our real value is being able to discern quality over quantity.
Increasingly, less really is more.

from The Signal - Now, I am one of those people who subscribe (mostly) to the “collect all the things” school of collection development. I have been around long enough to see successes where physical items that were purchased through blanket approval plans or seemingly wacky digital collections acquired or created through a fluke of opportunity become vital resources when new research trends take over or when new tools and increased computing capacity make innovative analysis possible.