• « My (Our) Abusive Relationship with Google and What We Can Do About It Will the Real Emily Please Stand Up »

• It’s the Collections that are Special

  by Lisa Carter

  February 11, 2009
   Print This Post

  In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to wel­come another guest
  author, Lisa Carter! Lisa has just recently been appointed as Vis­it­ing Pro­gram Offi­cer to work with the Asso­ci­a­tion of Research Libraries Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Work­ing Group. Read more to learn about her vision and thought-provoking ideas about the future of spe­cial collections…

  I’m begin­ning to think that what’s wrong with spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives[1] today is that they are con­sid­ered spe­cial.  They are set aside, revered and left as the last great mys­tery the Library holds.  The col­lec­tions them­selves are spe­cial in that they are rare, unique, fan­tas­tic and archaic and they do need spe­cial han­dling and care.  How­ever, our regard for these mate­ri­als has enabled us to treat them so dif­fer­ently that they are not acces­si­ble. We have locked these mate­ri­als up in our processes and our deliv­ery ser­vices, which has kept them out of the main­stream of infor­ma­tion avail­able to knowl­edge seek­ers.  They are only rarely seen as part of the knowl­edge build­ing con­ver­sa­tion[2] and it is because of how we (as librar­i­ans and archivists) treat them and present them.  We treat them as spe­cial in the sense of “sep­a­rate,” “extra,” “hav­ing spe­cial needs” instead of spe­cial in that they are what make our library spe­cial as “dis­tinc­tive sig­ni­fiers,” “our endur­ing core” and “our unique con­tri­bu­tion to the world of knowledge.”

  As librar­i­ans and archivists rede­fine our­selves and bet­ter artic­u­late how we add value, as we break down long estab­lished bar­ri­ers in our processes, spaces and ser­vices, we need to include our most unique col­lec­tions.  We reg­u­larly lever­age quickly evolv­ing trends in the infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ment by refo­cus­ing on the needs and pref­er­ences of our users in the con­text of very real com­pe­ti­tion and eco­nomic dif­fi­culty.  In this frame­work, libraries can embrace their spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives as a locus of dis­tinc­tion, exper­i­men­ta­tion and core value.  The time has come for libraries to inte­grate spe­cial col­lec­tions into the flow in every aspect of our work.

  Dis­tinc­tive Signifiers

  Libraries and librar­i­ans are con­stantly increas­ing their cool­ness quo­tient. Amer­i­can Libraries declares that “The Bun­heads are Dead” and cel­e­brates the diver­sity of back­grounds and work we all do to help peo­ple dis­cover infor­ma­tion. By adding learning/information com­mons and cof­fee bars, par­tic­i­pat­ing in social net­works, or hir­ing tech­ni­cally ori­ented, exper­i­men­tal, respon­sive, and adapt­able infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als, libraries strive to stay rel­e­vant.  Spe­cial Col­lec­tions areas and the librar­i­ans and archivists work­ing in them are sim­i­larly adapt­ing to change, focus­ing on users and exper­i­ment­ing with tech­nol­ogy[3].  In many cases, how­ever, they are going at it inde­pen­dently, because they are in sep­a­rate depart­ments with the spe­cial materials.

  Today’s archivists and librar­i­ans aren’t just cool because we have mad tech­nol­ogy skills, because our place has the best cof­fee and sweet comfy chairs or because we are über-helpful.  We also have the coolest stuff.  What is fun­da­men­tal to our shared pur­pose, crit­i­cal to our cen­tral mis­sion, and key to our very iden­tity is our abil­ity to con­nect our com­mu­ni­ties to knowl­edge and the raw mate­ri­als that inspire knowl­edge; and those resources exist con­cretely in our collections.

  “As we increas­ingly share a col­lec­tive col­lec­tion of books, it is the spe­cial col­lec­tions that will dis­tin­guish our insti­tu­tions.“[4] The rawest rep­re­sen­ta­tions of human endeavor and the build­ing blocks of new knowl­edge are the rare mate­ri­als and pri­mary sources in our spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives.  These col­lec­tions are often devel­oped around niche inter­ests and grounded in local­ized exper­tise.  They not only address the spe­cific infor­ma­tional needs of their con­stituency, but also dis­tin­guish their insti­tu­tion in the larger research com­mu­nity.  African-American cook­books are col­lected at the Uni­ver­sity of Alabama; Willa Cather’s man­u­scripts, let­ters, and pho­tographs can be found at the Uni­ver­sity of Nebraska-Lincoln; video and audio records in the Alwin Niko­lais and Mur­ray Louis Dance Col­lec­tion are hosted at Ohio Uni­ver­sity; and dig­i­tal assets of teach­ing and research are held by MIT in DSpace[5].  Pub­lic and spe­cial libraries also hold col­lec­tions unique to their com­mu­ni­ties that dis­tin­guish them around the world. The Boston Pub­lic Library and the Mar­garet Her­rick Library of the Acad­emy of Motion Pic­ture Arts and Sci­ences are just two high-profile exam­ples.  These libraries stand out from their peers because of their par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tions.  As Nicholas Barker remarks in his intro­duc­tion to Cel­e­brat­ing Research, “To be unique in some defin­able way, how­ever recon­dite, makes [a library] the object of an atten­tion that it would not oth­er­wise attract.”

  Con­nect­ing our users to infor­ma­tion cap­tured in our col­lec­tive col­lec­tions is the shared cen­tral chal­lenge in our information-laden, dynamic, instant-gratification envi­ron­ment.  As pro­fes­sion­als work­ing in libraries with spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives, expos­ing our sin­gu­lar col­lec­tions is our unique con­tri­bu­tion to the broader world of knowl­edge.  We must do this in the con­text of trends in the field, includ­ing enhanc­ing teach­ing and learn­ing, increas­ing effi­ciency and pro­duc­tiv­ity in cre­at­ing access, and seiz­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties pre­sented by technology.

  Improv­ing Teach­ing and Learning

  Infor­ma­tion seek­ing is per­sonal.  Users can be moti­vated by the paper that is due the next day, a group with which they iden­tify, or a per­sonal expe­ri­ence or inter­est.  In her Novem­ber 5, 2008 post on this blog, Ellie Col­lier dis­cusses “sticky ideas” and the value of sim­ple, unex­pected, con­crete, cred­i­ble, emo­tional sto­ries.  Spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives con­tain locally rel­e­vant, unique mate­ri­als and are a rich source for those kinds of sto­ries.  In an aca­d­e­mic library, the uni­ver­sity archives holds mate­ri­als from the past that reflect today’s stu­dent expe­ri­ence.  A pub­lic library can con­nect mate­ri­als about the immi­grants’ lives in the 1900s with the sit­u­a­tion of modern-day migrant work­ers’ fam­i­lies in their community.

  Pri­mary sources and other research mate­ri­als from spe­cial col­lec­tions can get learn­ers think­ing crit­i­cally about how a source relates to their own infor­ma­tion seek­ing (and gen­er­at­ing) behav­ior.  How is a pioneer’s diary about her expe­ri­ences on the Ore­gon Trail like a student’s use of Face­book to doc­u­ment her ser­vice trip to Costa Rica?  What is the dif­fer­ence between the actual text of JFK’s address at Rice Uni­ver­sity on the nation’s space effort and your local news­pa­per accounts of it, and how does that com­pare to watch­ing Pres­i­dent Obama’s inau­gu­ra­tion speech on YouTube and watch­ing CNN’s analy­sis of it the next day?  By lever­ag­ing and ana­lyz­ing spe­cial col­lec­tion mate­ri­als to enhance learn­ing expe­ri­ences, the con­text of infor­ma­tion cre­ation, analy­sis and trans­mis­sion can become highly personalized.

  As you con­tem­plate your next dis­cus­sion with your users about “the many types of use­ful infor­ma­tion [and] how and when to use them“[6] and engage them in an infor­ma­tion source’s “back story,” con­sider using spe­cial col­lec­tions mate­ri­als to make your point.  Librar­i­ans, fac­ulty and archivists should col­lab­o­rate on instruc­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties to ensure that all kinds of infor­ma­tion sources are con­sid­ered dur­ing research.  Inte­grat­ing spe­cial col­lec­tions into the class­room expe­ri­ence and at the ref­er­ence desk can sig­nif­i­cantly enrich the library’s con­tri­bu­tion to teach­ing and learning.

  Stream­lin­ing the Cre­ation of Access

  In a time of tight­en­ing bud­gets and web-based infor­ma­tion seek­ing, libraries are reen­vi­sion­ing the role of and activ­i­ties around resource descrip­tion.  This shift could directly impact the avail­abil­ity of spe­cial col­lec­tions and archival mate­ri­als.  In Karen Calhoun’s 2006 report on The Chang­ing Nature of the Cat­a­log and its Inte­gra­tion with Other Dis­cov­ery Tools, she talks about strate­gies for keep­ing cat­a­loging rel­e­vant includ­ing lead­ing resource dis­cov­ery by devel­op­ing infor­ma­tion sys­tems that “surfac(e) research libraries’ rich col­lec­tions in ways that will sub­stan­tially enhance schol­arly pro­duc­tiv­ity worldwide.”

  On the Record, a report from the Library of Con­gress Work­ing Group on the Future of Bib­li­o­graphic Con­trol, pro­vides con­crete rec­om­men­da­tions for the library field.  These include redi­rect­ing resources to enable dis­cov­ery of spe­cial col­lec­tions; cre­at­ing basic-level access to all unique mate­ri­als; focus­ing on prac­ti­ca­ble, flex­i­ble and user-centered descrip­tion; inte­grat­ing spe­cial col­lec­tions into dis­cov­ery are­nas; and shar­ing spe­cial col­lec­tions’ meta­data and author­ity records[7]. To me this is a clear call to action to redi­rect cat­a­loging resources to expose hid­den spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives, and to inte­grate dis­cov­ery of these mate­ri­als along­side that of our other collections.

  While the broader library world con­sid­ers direct­ing more resources to expos­ing hid­den col­lec­tions, the archival com­mu­nity is also work­ing to get more col­lec­tions into the hands of the users more quickly.  In 2003, ARL pub­lished the white paper Hid­den Col­lec­tions, Schol­arly Bar­ri­ers, which notes that “the cost to schol­ar­ship and soci­ety of hav­ing so much of our cul­tural record sit­ting on shelves, inac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic, rep­re­sents an urgent need of the high­est order to be addressed by ARL and other libraries.”  Mark Greene and Den­nis Meissner’s arti­cle “More Prod­uct, Less Process” takes the archival com­mu­nity to task for the prob­lem of hid­den col­lec­tions.  They sug­gest that archivists “give higher pri­or­ity, in prac­tice, to serv­ing the per­ceived needs of our col­lec­tions than to serv­ing the demon­stra­ble needs of our con­stituents.”  Many in the archival com­mu­nity are refo­cus­ing their pro­cess­ing work to expe­dite access by under­tak­ing only nec­es­sary arrange­ment, min­i­mal preser­va­tion steps and suf­fi­cient descrip­tion to pro­mote use.

  This new focus has cut to the core of activ­ity in Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Archives. Some Spe­cial Col­lec­tions have focused on cre­at­ing collection-level records for all col­lec­tions, processed and unprocessed, for their library cat­a­logs.  Oth­ers are fac­ing the chal­lenges of pro­vid­ing access to min­i­mally processed or unprocessed col­lec­tions, such as mate­ri­als secu­rity, researcher frus­tra­tion and pro­cess­ing on-demand.  Archivists are set­ting aside per­fec­tion and learn­ing to embrace the inher­ent messi­ness of archival records in order to put access first.  This places the onus back on researchers to find specifics and mean­ing in mas­sive col­lec­tions.  We are redefin­ing our­selves from gate­keep­ers and inter­preters of his­tory to facil­i­ta­tors of access[8].

  If we could com­bine the trans­for­ma­tion that is tak­ing place in our cat­a­loging depart­ments with the tran­si­tion in archival prac­tice, libraries could cre­ate a rev­o­lu­tion in access.  The result will be an explo­sion of unique descrip­tive infor­ma­tion that could be used to dis­cover dis­tinc­tive col­lec­tions world­wide.  The orig­i­nal cat­a­lo­ging skills (ana­lyt­i­cal and descrip­tive) that cat­a­logers have honed on cir­cu­lat­ing library mate­ri­als can be rede­ployed (with min­i­mal retrain­ing) to assist with the arrange­ment and descrip­tion of sig­nif­i­cant amounts of unprocessed col­lec­tions.  Apti­tude for manip­u­lat­ing, man­ag­ing and reusing struc­tured meta­data can unlock the unre­al­ized poten­tial of our Encoded Archival Descrip­tion find­ing aids.  Cat­a­logers’ under­stand­ing of data nor­mal­iza­tion and meta­data map­ping can pull data out of home-grown archival descrip­tion tools and deposit it in places where it can be manip­u­la­ble and dis­cov­er­able in user-friendly access sys­tems.  By reen­vi­sion­ing the work in cat­a­loging and in archives, libraries will be able to offer greater dis­cov­er­abil­ity for their most pre­cious resources.

  Web 2.0

  Enhanced dis­cov­er­abil­ity can only be truly real­ized when libraries develop tools that expose the descrip­tive work of cat­a­logers and archivists to the sur­face of the Web.  This is where those tech-savvy infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als come in.  Many spe­cial col­lec­tions librar­i­ans and archivists are try­ing to open online dialogs about their mate­ri­als with users.  Archives blogs are grow­ing in num­ber (check out the Soci­ety of North Car­olina Archivists’  blogroll for a sam­ple from North Car­olina).  How­ever, blogs’ reach still tends to be lim­ited to exist­ing users or those who seek out the archives and expo­sure is only on high­lighted collections.

  The Next Gen­er­a­tion Find­ing Aids research group at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan is explor­ing “new online col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies, such as fil­ter­ing and rec­om­mender sys­tems, [to] allow for new meth­ods of inter­act­ing with and expe­ri­enc­ing pri­mary sources.”  Sta­tis­tics from their test bed, The Polar Bear Expe­di­tion Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions, demon­strate that even a project with a very lim­ited (but pas­sion­ate) user base can result in sig­nif­i­cant atten­tion and engage­ment, par­tic­u­larly when it comes to users con­tribut­ing descrip­tive infor­ma­tion about mate­ri­als.[9] Mean­while the Tri­an­gle Research Library Net­work (TRLN) in North Car­olina is inves­ti­gat­ing whether index­ing Encoded Archival Descrip­tion meta­data in its shared cat­a­log can bring com­bined dis­cov­er­abil­ity to archival col­lec­tions as it has for cir­cu­lat­ing mate­ri­als.  Early chal­lenges have exposed the dif­fer­ences that exist in archival descrip­tive prac­tice that will need to be over­come to enable cross search­ing of archival find­ing aids.

  Address­ing the chal­lenge from another direc­tion, libraries are real­iz­ing increased access after two decades of dig­i­tiz­ing their spe­cial col­lec­tions and archives.  Dig­i­tal copies of selected items are avail­able in a wide vari­ety of institution-based dig­i­tal repos­i­to­ries and con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems.  Many of these efforts have been “bou­tique” or highly focused projects to dig­i­tize cherry-picked items.  Just as item-level preser­va­tion has been iden­ti­fied as an unsus­tain­able prac­tice in “More Prod­uct, Less Process” (MPLP), selec­tive dig­i­ti­za­tion projects have left “our vast col­lec­tions rep­re­sented by a rel­a­tively small num­ber of gor­geous images, lov­ingly selected, described, and pre­sented in deep web por­tals.“[10] If we are to truly explode access to spe­cial col­lec­tions mate­ri­als, we need to take a less dis­cern­ing approach to digitizing.

  Fol­low­ing on MPLP, libraries are now begin­ning to test mod­els for mass dig­i­ti­za­tion of spe­cial col­lec­tions mate­ri­als.  Shift­ing Gears: Gear­ing Up to Get Into the Flow, an essay reflect­ing on the Dig­i­ti­za­tion Mat­ters forum, encour­ages libraries to scan for access, scan on demand, scan whole col­lec­tions or rep­re­sen­ta­tive chunks, describe scanned items min­i­mally, and focus on quan­tity and dis­cov­er­abil­ity.  In addi­tion, the authors sug­gest that “increas­ing access to spe­cial col­lec­tions needs to be pro­gram­mat­i­cally embed­ded across the enter­prise.  Con­tin­u­ing to give these activ­i­ties ‘spe­cial project’ sta­tus implies that pro­vid­ing access is not mission-essential.”  The bot­tom line: expos­ing spe­cial col­lec­tions is not a Spe­cial Col­lec­tions prob­lem; it is an enterprise-wide opportunity.

  A few insti­tu­tions have taken on the chal­lenge.  The Smith­son­ian Archives of Amer­i­can Art received a Terra Foun­da­tion for Amer­i­can Art grant to dig­i­tize entire col­lec­tions “with equip­ment designed specif­i­cally for increased lev­els of pro­duc­tion” and to describe mate­ri­als in aggre­ga­tions rather than at the item level. The Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions has devel­oped a stream­lined pro­duc­tion model that has reduced their dig­i­tiz­ing costs from $1.53 per page to $0.33 per page[11]; how­ever, in usabil­ity test­ing they found that stu­dents “reported want­ing MORE not LESS meta­data.“[12] Exper­i­ments with pro­vid­ing dig­i­tized images with min­i­mal meta­data embody the sac­ri­fice made when choos­ing quan­tity over quality.

  The Library of Con­gress found that enlist­ing users in the descrip­tion of mate­ri­als may coun­ter­act the ini­tial lack of rich item-level meta­data.  As reported in For the Com­mon Good the Library made two col­lec­tions of pho­tographs avail­able online in the Flickr Com­mons, invit­ing users to con­tribute enhanced descrip­tions.  Accord­ing to the report, “7,166 com­ments were left on 2,873 pho­tos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts. .…  More than 500 Prints and Pho­tographs Online Cat­a­log (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new infor­ma­tion pro­vided by the Flickr Com­mu­nity.”  With engage­ment like that, why ago­nize over descrip­tion and sub­ject head­ings?  The abil­ity of users to con­nect with col­lec­tions on this per­sonal level also increases their sense of own­er­ship and rela­tion­ship to his­tory.  Knowledge-building is borne out of this kind of per­son­al­ized learning.

  Addi­tional archives-based efforts to expose unique col­lec­tions in the Web 2.0 envi­ron­ment are listed on the Archives­Next blog.  To most effec­tively con­tribute their dis­tinc­tive build­ing blocks of knowl­edge to the broader research envi­ron­ment, how­ever, libraries can­not rel­e­gate dig­i­ti­za­tion and dis­cov­ery inno­va­tion to spe­cial projects in Spe­cial Col­lec­tions.  Along­side realign­ing the descrip­tion and data-structure exper­tise pro­vided by cat­a­logers, libraries must apply the tech­ni­cal, pro­gram­ming and devel­op­ment pro­fi­ciency in their infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy depart­ments to this chal­lenge.  The exper­tise cul­ti­vated in ref­er­ence, instruc­tional, out­reach, and collection-management staff is also crit­i­cal to insur­ing that these efforts are rel­e­vant in address­ing users’ needs.

  Con­ver­gence

  For libraries to con­tribute effec­tively to knowledge-building in their com­mu­ni­ties, the con­structed par­ti­tion that has set spe­cial col­lec­tions aside as “spe­cial” must be dis­man­tled.  It is time to inte­grate the selec­tion, descrip­tion, research ser­vice and tech­no­log­i­cal activ­i­ties in every library with those needed to con­nect users to our most dis­tinc­tive, unique col­lec­tions.  Libraries must rec­og­nize that while the col­lec­tions are spe­cial and even have spe­cial needs, the tal­ents and skills needed to expose them are found library-wide.  Addi­tion­ally, many spe­cial col­lec­tion mate­ri­als are now born dig­i­tal and do not require phys­i­cal seg­re­ga­tion in our tra­di­tional Spe­cial Col­lec­tions units.  Fur­ther, enterprise-wide effort is even more crit­i­cal to born-digital col­lec­tions’ expo­sure and sur­vival.  Users just want the best infor­ma­tion for their task and they want it to be avail­able all in the same place.

  

  The Research Library Group out­lines a con­tin­uum of col­lab­o­ra­tion in libraries, archives and muse­ums (LAMs) that begins with con­tact between two enti­ties, moves through coop­er­a­tion and coor­di­na­tion to col­lab­o­ra­tion and even­tu­ally arrives at con­ver­gence.  As LAMs move through the con­tin­uum, they grow towards shared invest­ment and risk, but real­ize more pro­found ben­e­fits.  When col­lab­o­ra­tion becomes con­ver­gence, shared activ­ity becomes infra­struc­ture.[13] In today’s libraries, we need con­ver­gence around spe­cial col­lec­tions that erases our exist­ing silos.

  Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Archives may sense a loss of their unique iden­tity dur­ing such a trans­for­ma­tion.  Part­ners in other library units may resist activ­ity pre­vi­ously out­side their purview. Yet shar­ing respon­si­bil­ity for our dis­tinc­tive, val­ued and unique col­lec­tions will raise the pro­file of the whole library and, most impor­tantly, ben­e­fit our users.

  Spe­cial col­lec­tions reflect our endur­ing iden­ti­ties by defin­ing who we were, inform­ing what we will become, and dis­tin­guish­ing our com­mu­ni­ties.  As crit­i­cal com­po­nents in the knowl­edge con­ver­sa­tion, spe­cial col­lec­tions must be inte­grated with other resources, and exposed in the same venues and path­ways.  As col­lec­tions that each library can uniquely con­tribute to the over­all research and learn­ing envi­ron­ment, they must be main­streamed and acknowl­edged as mission-critical.  It is only the col­lec­tions that are spe­cial in Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, not the work of mak­ing them acces­si­ble and not our users.  For the sake of our users and our libraries we need to stop treat­ing them separately.

  What you can do:

  • Selec­tors, col­lec­tion man­agers and branch librar­i­ans, talk to the cura­tors in Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Archives about how you can help with strate­gi­cally tar­geted col­lec­tion build­ing efforts. What makes a rel­e­vant, dis­tinc­tive col­lec­tion in your community?
  • Cat­a­logers and meta­data experts, dis­cuss the meta­data gen­er­a­tion, manip­u­la­tion and trans­for­ma­tion needs for spe­cial col­lec­tions with lead proces­sors. You’d be sur­prised at how much assis­tance you can pro­vide but be pre­pared to face big chal­lenges and quantities.
  • Access and deliv­ery ser­vices, you can’t imag­ine the exper­tise you can share regard­ing col­lec­tion main­te­nance, secu­rity and track­ing until you have that cup of cof­fee with the ref­er­ence staff in Spe­cial Collections.
  • Ref­er­ence and infor­ma­tion ser­vices, engage your Spe­cial Col­lec­tions col­leagues in your instruc­tion activ­i­ties. Con­sider cross-training on the ref­er­ence desks, offer to cover a ref­er­ence shift in Spe­cial Col­lec­tions. Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Archives folks, rotate into ser­vice on the main ref­er­ence desk.
  • Infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, imag­ine the oppor­tu­ni­ties! There are data­bases, find­ing aids and home grown sys­tems to inte­grate, improve and stream­line. Let Spe­cial Col­lec­tions offer you a chal­lenge that will make man­ag­ing server space and device inven­to­ries look easy.
  • Dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, if you want con­tent, we’ve got con­tent. Allow Spe­cial Col­lec­tions to be your play­ground for imple­ment­ing new, cool tools. We’ve got dig­i­tal objects com­ing out of our ears. Can you get them onto desk­tops, mobile devices and course man­age­ment systems?
  • Spe­cial col­lec­tions and archivist col­leagues, share your most inter­est­ing chal­lenges, be will­ing to let oth­ers muck around in your stuff, be artic­u­late and prac­ti­cal about your needs and think cre­atively about what you have to offer your col­leagues in return.

  Thanks to Josh Ranger and Bill Lan­dis for their ideas, feed­back and care­ful read­ing of a draft of this piece and to Hilary Davis and Kim Leeder from ItLwtLP for their encour­age­ment, ques­tions and sug­ges­tions for each ver­sion. Thanks to Hilary and Brett Bon­field for last minute tech­ni­cal assis­tance.  Spe­cial thanks to Ben Carter who stayed home to pro­vide tech­ni­cal sup­port and thwart bad behav­ior plu­g­ins.
  

  ---

  [1] In the spirit of this piece, I try to dis­tin­guish between spe­cial col­lec­tions, the col­lec­tions, and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions, the unit of the library, by cap­i­tal­iz­ing when I am refer­ring to the unit.  Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Archives can be depart­ments in a library or insti­tu­tion; spe­cial col­lec­tions belong to the whole institution.

  [2] For an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on the knowl­edge build­ing con­ver­sa­tion and the library’s role in par­tic­i­pa­tory net­works, read the Infor­ma­tion Insti­tute of Syracuse’s tech­nol­ogy brief Par­tic­i­pa­tory Net­works: The Library as Con­ver­sa­tion for ALA.  Not only do they envelop spe­cial col­lec­tions as key aspects of the con­ver­sa­tion but they also address the impor­tance of inno­vat­ing tech­nol­ogy “at the core of the library.”

  [3] For more on reen­vi­sion­ing archival iden­tity, see Mark Green’s inau­gural pres­i­den­tial address for SAA “Strength­en­ing Our Iden­tity, Fight­ing Our Foibles.”

  [4] Quoted from Ricky Erway’s “Sup­ply and Demand:  Spe­cial Col­lec­tions and Digi­ti­sa­tion” for Liber Quar­terly, 2008.  Many vari­a­tions of this sen­tence have been appear­ing in var­i­ous com­men­taries since the pub­li­ca­tion of ARL’s anniver­sary pub­li­ca­tion Cel­e­brat­ing Research with Nicholas Barker’s per­sua­sive introduction.

  [5] These col­lec­tions (and more) were high­lighted by their insti­tu­tions as dis­tinc­tive sig­ni­fiers of their col­lec­tions for ARL’s Cel­e­brat­ing Research:  Rare and Spe­cial Col­lec­tions from the Mem­ber­ship of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Research Libraries in cel­e­bra­tion of the Association’s 75^th anniversary.

  [6] Quoted from Ellie Collier’s “In Praise of the Inter­net: Shift­ing Focus and Engag­ing Crit­i­cal Think­ing Skills” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, Jan­u­ary 7, 2009.

  [7] Found in Rec­om­men­da­tions 2.1.1 – 2.1.5 on pages 22 and 23 of the Library of Congress’s On the Record.

  [8] The self iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of archivists as “gate­keep­ers of his­tory” is inter­ro­gated by Bar­bara L. Craig, in “Cana­dian Archivists:  What Types of Peo­ple Are They,”, Ann Ped­er­son, “Under­stand­ing Our­selves & Oth­ers:  Aus­tralian Archivists & Tem­pera­ment,” and Charles R. Schultz, “Archivists:  What Types of Peo­ple Are They?”  Prove­nance 14: (1996).

  [9] For more on the Polar Bear Expe­di­tion Project, please refer to the arti­cle by Magia Ghetu Krause and Eliz­a­beth Yakel, “Inter­ac­tion in Vir­tual Archives: The Polar Bear Expe­di­tion Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions Next Gen­er­a­tion Find­ing Aid” Amer­i­can Archivist 70:2, Fall — Win­ter 2007, pages 282 – 314.

  [10] Quoted from Ricky Erway and Jen­nifer Schaffner’s Shift­ing Gears:  Gear­ing up to Get Into the Flow from OCLC Pro­grams and Research, 2007.

  [11] Which Joshua Ranger told us at the 2006 MAC Fall Sym­po­sium.

  [12] Reported at the SAA Meet­ing in 2008 and in a hand­out to OCLC’s Member’s Coun­cil in Feb­ru­ary 2008. While the work at the The Smith­son­ian Archives of Amer­i­can Art is ground­break­ing in scope and method­ol­ogy, Ranger’s work explores how any library can make an effort towards quick and dirty dig­i­ti­za­tion and the ramifications.

  [13] For more on the col­lab­o­ra­tion con­tin­uum see Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Col­lab­o­ra­tion Among Libraries, Archives and Muse­ums by Diane Zorich, Gunter Waibel and Ricky Erway for OCLC Pro­grams and Research, 2008.
  

  You might also be inter­ested in:

  • Swings and Roundabouts
  • A Use­ful Ampli­fi­ca­tion of Records That Are Unavoid­ably Needed Anyway
  • What water?
  • A Look at Librar­i­an­ship through the Lens of an Aca­d­e­mic Library Seri­als Review
  • Are You Worth It? What Return on Invest­ment Can and Can’t Tell You About Your Library
  Tags: archives, cataloging, collaboration, digital repositories, e-research, information literacy, librarianship, Special Collections, work

  RSS feed for comments on this post

  Leave a comment | Trackback
• « My (Our) Abusive Relationship with Google and What We Can Do About It Will the Real Emily Please Stand Up »

16 Comments

• Opening Access to Special Collections and Archives…02.11.09 « The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian’s Weblog says:

  February 11, 2009 at 10:59 am

  […] a short excerpt from a lengthy but sig­nif­i­cantly important/relevant post from Lisa Carter titled It’s the Col­lec­tions that are Spe­cial on In The Library With the Lead Pipe blog […]

  Reply
• Wilfred Drew says:

  February 11, 2009 at 3:19 pm

  I have been involved in an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion with the librar­ian in charge of our col­lege archives here. It revolves around why the archives are only cat­a­loged in our web opac at a very high level (box or set of boxes), not down to the indi­vid­ual item. I con­tin­u­ally ask her how peo­ple are going to find what is in the archives if it is not cat­a­loged in the same way as our books, videos, or seri­als. She keeps telling me that peo­ple who research archives do it in per­son. It tends to be a very cir­cu­lar argument.

  Reply
• Lisa says:

  February 11, 2009 at 10:20 pm

  Wil­fred, it’s great that you are hav­ing that dia­log! One way to think about it is to com­pare the descrip­tion of a col­lec­tion to the cat­a­loging of a book. Items in col­lec­tion (let­ters, pho­tos, videos) could be seen as pages of a person’s life or an organization’s activ­ity. The aggre­gate has mean­ing as a whole and some­times we pro­vide a table of con­tents (which we call series-level or folder-level inven­tory). But just as a cat­a­loger would never cat­a­log each page in a book, archivists try to avoid describ­ing each item. The main rea­son for this (in addi­tion to not hav­ing the resources to describe at the item-level) is that con­text is crit­i­cal. As with pages, the mate­ri­als around the item give it more mean­ing and the group of mate­ri­als should be used together. The researchers gain more knowl­edge if they “read” the col­lec­tion for them­selves. Fur­ther, we never know what a researcher will find most valu­able about a col­lec­tion. One per­son might have one use for a set of let­ters while another has a com­pletely dif­fer­ent use. Try­ing to antic­i­pate what is most valu­able leads us to a gran­u­lar level of descrip­tion that is not help­ful to the researcher and unsus­tain­able as a prac­tice. Does this help?

  Reply
• Hilary Davis says:

  February 12, 2009 at 1:57 pm

  Hi Lisa — thanks for shar­ing your vision for “spe­cial” col­lec­tions! I’m won­der­ing what your thoughts are as to the poten­tial impact (if any) of the Google Books project (that was described last week in this blog) on the visibility/relevance of archives/“special” col­lec­tions content?

  Reply
• Bill Drew says:

  February 12, 2009 at 3:41 pm

  In reply to Lisa, It makes sense. It is the some­times pro­vide a table of con­tents that both­ers me. That table of con­tents is not search­able on our online cat­a­log. In my mind it must be.

  Reply
• Lisa says:

  February 12, 2009 at 4:00 pm

  @Wilfred — I agree with that. We are work­ing on that chal­lenge in our insti­tu­tion as well.
  @Hilary — Well, I hope the Google Books project means that as more books become acces­si­ble online through GBP, libraries will be able to turn more of their resources to work­ing on spe­cial col­lec­tions. It goes back to the idea that as the mate­ri­als that libraries com­monly hold (cir­cu­lat­ing books, jour­nals, media) become more and more avail­able online what will make a library dis­tinc­tive is their local, unique, spe­cial col­lec­tions. Plus Google is pro­vid­ing a demand sit­u­a­tion that should make more libraries want to dig­i­tize more of their spe­cial col­lec­tions so that they have some­thing spe­cial to offer the con­ver­sa­tion that they can claim as their own.

  Reply
• Kim Leeder says:

  February 16, 2009 at 10:01 am

  Lisa, thanks for the great post. I won­der if the increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions will in large part solve the prob­lems of cat­a­loging those items. For a long time I’ve been watch­ing the dig­i­tal col­lec­tions fea­ture in AL Direct (the ALA email newslet­ter) and the list of links I have at this point is really impres­sive! Of course I expect that very few libraries will ever be able to dig­i­tize their entire archives, but if every library man­aged to get through their most notable col­lec­tions — which seems to be what’s hap­pen­ing out there? — things are going to change dra­mat­i­cally. The next ques­tion in my mind is: do we rely on Google to search and find all those dis­parate dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, or is there some World­Cat equiv­a­lent we can cre­ate to search all of them?

  Reply
• Lisa says:

  February 16, 2009 at 12:33 pm

  Kim, I hope so. I’m won­der­ing if we dig­i­tize spe­cial col­lec­tions, enter­ing only the meta­data nec­es­sary to get them online, can peo­ple describe them from the dig­i­tal copy? LC has shown us that com­mu­ni­ties will rally to enhance meta­data if we only pro­vide lim­ited. As for rely­ing on Google, I think we have to expose these col­lec­tions through Google. At the col­lec­tion level, we can pro­vide access through World­Cat. Also, RLG (now with OCLC) has Archives­Grid (http://​archive​g​rid​.org/​w​e​b​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​jsp). There’s some buzz for doing a union cat­a­log or cen­sus of col­lec­tions, but some argue that we should spend our time expos­ing the col­lec­tions where the users are: Google, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Me, I think that any­where you can expose them, you should.

  Reply
• Christian Dupont says:

  February 17, 2009 at 11:46 am

  Lisa,

  I’m pleased to see that you’ve been handed a baton (albeit in the form of lead pipe!) to help raise aware­ness and crit­i­cal knowl­edge about what makes spe­cial col­lec­tions spe­cial — namely the col­lec­tions themselves.

  What your post shows so clearly, in fact, is that the chal­lenges that spe­cial col­lec­tions librar­i­ans and archivists face in try­ing to make their col­lec­tions more dis­cov­er­able and acces­si­ble are in many ways the same chal­lenges that librar­i­ans who man­age gen­eral col­lec­tions also face. Increas­ingly, it is how col­lec­tions are con­nected to online ser­vices at the net­work level that makes all the dif­fer­ence in who finds them and how they are used.

  For those of us who have spent most of our careers work­ing in and around aca­d­e­mic libraries, we have wit­nessed a shift­ing of respon­si­bil­i­ties that points toward a shift­ing of mis­sion that has not yet been fully appre­ci­ated, espe­cially by our par­ent institutions.

  Whereas research libraries pre­vi­ously existed and were man­aged to pro­vide max­i­mum ben­e­fit to the fac­ulty and stu­dents of the par­ent insti­tu­tion, global net­work­ing sys­tems have exposed them to the larger world, which can now claim them — rightly, I think — as com­mon cul­tural (intel­lec­tual, sci­en­tific, lit­er­ary, etc.) assets from which every­one ought to be able to ben­e­fit. And this goes for “gen­eral” col­lec­tions as well as “spe­cial” col­lec­tions, where the most valu­able vol­ume is gen­er­ally the one you can get to quickest.

  It is the devel­op­ment of the global infor­ma­tion econ­omy that is the main respon­si­ble for this shift, even as research libraries have been shift­ing a lot of their resources into plac­ing their col­lec­tions in the net­worked infor­ma­tion stream. Yet for all their doings, it seems to me that research libraries have not yet man­aged to claim a viable stake in the evolv­ing econ­omy, one that will carry them for­ward with con­ti­nu­ity into the future. Own­er­ship of phys­i­cal col­lec­tions is one asset, but own­er­ship and con­trol of infor­ma­tion about those col­lec­tions and abil­ity to deliver it quickly and eas­ily is arguably the greater asset.

  I’m all for expos­ing col­lec­tions at the net­work level but I do have some con­cern that unless research libraries can find a more direct means of tap­ping into the infor­ma­tion econ­omy that their abil­ity to do what they have done so well for so long will be dimin­ished. The insti­tu­tional bud­get crises that are being pre­cip­i­tated by the now global reces­sion are likely to prove a real test in this regard. Will the choices we make now in the face of eco­nomic hard­ship be cre­ative ones that help us to thrive in the future or will they tend to force fore­clo­sures of our options and oppor­tu­ni­ties we have to expand the mis­sion of research libraries to the global level where they are demanded?

  I’d be curi­ous to know if you or oth­ers who read your post also see the sit­u­a­tion I am try­ing describe.

  Reply
• Lisa says:

  February 17, 2009 at 9:55 pm

  Chris­t­ian– Well, that’s the trick isn’t it? Are our insti­tu­tions going to be able to iden­tify what is mission-critical to mov­ing for­ward and invest in dra­matic change? Or are they going to hun­ker down and pro­tect “what we’ve always done” first? I guess a lot of it is how you define mission-critical and I think tap­ping into the info econ­omy is key. I’m inter­ested in your ref­er­ence to “deliver it quickly and eas­ily”, it means fun­da­men­tally chang­ing from qual­ity to quan­tity doesn’t it?

  Reply
• Lynne M. Thomas says:

  February 19, 2009 at 9:23 am

  *nods vig­or­ously*

  I couldn’t agree more with the bulk of this post. My one con­cern is that many of these goals are more eas­ily achieved at larger insti­tu­tions that have more insti­tu­tional resources, both in terms of finances, and staff time and exper­tise. I’d *LOVE* to have much more of my spe­cial col­lec­tions online (50,000 pub­lic domain dime nov­els, any­one?), but the resources to dig­i­tize, mark up, and make avail­able in bulk just aren’t there (yet).

  Reply
• Lisa says:

  February 19, 2009 at 9:32 am

  So Lynne, does that mean you couldn’t engage your ref­er­ence, cir­cu­la­tion or cat­a­loging staff in dig­i­tiz­ing those dime nov­els? Or do you not have enough of those resources either? I do agree with you that it’s eas­ier to shift resources around at a larger institution.

  Reply
• Christ says:

  February 23, 2009 at 6:13 pm

  Lisa,

  Your advice to Lynne (Hi Lynne!) points to what I was going to say in response to your com­ment on my post­ing about shift­ing empha­sis from qual­ity to quan­tity in order to tap into the infor­ma­tion econ­omy and pro­vide broader access to our collections.

  At the heart of your sug­ges­tion to Lynne to engage her ref­er­ence, cir­cu­la­tion or cat­a­loging staff in dig­i­tiz­ing dime nov­els is the prin­ci­ple of dis­trib­uted work­flows. Cer­tainly one imped­i­ment to get­ting more done in spe­cial col­lec­tions is staffing. Yet if we ana­lyze what work actu­ally needs to get done and then what skills and equip­ment are needed to do it, I think we’ll find that much of it does not nec­es­sar­ily need peo­ple with spe­cial col­lec­tions and archival expe­ri­ence. Nor does it nec­es­sar­ily need to be done in spe­cial col­lec­tions secure areas.

  The prob­lem comes pre­cisely with engag­ing the com­mit­ment of other staff, as that is typ­i­cally a man­age­r­ial func­tion beyond the con­trol of the spe­cial col­lec­tions depart­ment head. Higher lev­els of admin­is­tra­tion are typ­i­cally the areas need to be engaged to get this kind of col­lab­o­ra­tion to hap­pen. But spe­cial col­lec­tions librar­i­ans can do a lot to make the case and to offer pro­pos­als of new types of work­flows that will help to ensure that back­logged col­lec­tions get cat­a­loged and processed, that images get scanned and meta­data encoded, and that researchers are served. Per­haps the new ARL work­ing group report on spe­cial col­lec­tions will help admin­is­tra­tors bet­ter under­stand the poten­tial of spe­cial col­lec­tions to serve their insti­tu­tional mis­sions and encour­age them to allo­cate staffing in cre­ative ways to bet­ter sup­port them.

  Ensur­ing that spe­cial col­lec­tions “prod­ucts” (e.g., infor­ma­tion about col­lec­tions and dig­i­tal col­lec­tions) get deliv­ered quickly and eas­ily means get­ting them into sys­tems that oper­ate at the net­work level with network-level effi­ciency. From there, we need to find ways to con­nect users and what they find with our insti­tu­tions and knowl­edge­able staff. Mak­ing that con­nec­tion, which involves man­ag­ing rela­tion­ships with our users, is where the qual­ity real comes in.

  Qual­ity cat­a­loging and meta­data descrip­tion is impor­tant, but users really only need enough to find resources using the sim­plis­tic strate­gies they typ­i­cally employ. Users do not nec­es­sar­ily want to be trained in how to cre­ate more com­plex and more pow­er­ful searches that takes advan­tage of sophis­ti­cated and deep meta­data encod­ing schemes; rather they want to be able to type a few words into a search box and quickly see results that they can start sort­ing through, com­par­ing and using as the basis for refin­ing or launch­ing new searches.

  Users also want to be able to ask ques­tions of knowl­edge­able experts once they get into a search process. That’s where libraries need to be able to step in pro­vide easy links to their ser­vices and staff. Ser­vice qual­ity is every bit as impor­tant as data qual­ity in con­di­tion­ing the user’s per­cep­tion of qual­ity and insti­tu­tional trust.

  Chris­t­ian

  Reply
• Lisa says:

  February 26, 2009 at 3:15 pm

  Chris­t­ian — I like your obser­va­tion that the qual­ity in service/discoverability may be more impor­tant than gran­u­lar meta­data. A focus on ser­vice is exactly the point. But I’ve always had the ques­tion, how do we know how much is enough descrip­tion for the users “to find resources using the sim­plis­tic strate­gies they typ­i­cally employ”. How do we know what is “nec­es­sary”, “min­i­mal” and “suf­fi­cient” (to ref­er­ence MPLP again)? –Lisa

  Reply
• Christ says:

  February 27, 2009 at 10:35 am

  Lisa,
  Did you hap­pen to receive Terry Belanger’s annual Rare Book School Valen­tine Thought poster? The quo­ta­tion this year is “You never know what enough is until you know what is more than enough.“
  Funny, but true, and maybe applic­a­ble here.
  It seems to me that one way to fig­ure out what descrip­tive infor­ma­tion is suf­fi­cient is to ana­lyze user search behav­iors to learn what infor­ma­tion they are not tak­ing advan­tage of. This can be done with qual­i­ta­tive meth­ods, like focus groups and direct obser­va­tions of indi­vid­ual search behav­iors, but I expect it can be done more effec­tively with the quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis. Think of how Google and other search engines ana­lyze your search behav­iors and you get the idea.
  If we find that user searchers are not tak­ing advan­tage of cer­tain types of data, then maybe we don’t need to pro­vide it, or pro­vide it in every case by default.

  Reply
• Christ says:

  February 27, 2009 at 1:01 pm

  Lisa,
  Thanks for men­tion­ing Lor­can Dempsey’s recent arti­cle in First Monday:

  http://​first​mon​day​.org/​h​t​b​i​n​/​c​g​i​w​r​a​p​/​b​i​n​/​o​j​s​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​p​h​p​/​f​m​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​v​i​e​w​/​2​2​9​1​/​2​070

  A pro­pos of our con­ver­sa­tion here, I was struck by the fol­low­ing para­graph under “Some Issues for Libraries”:

  “Ser­vices. As a grow­ing pro­por­tion of library use is net­work – based, the library becomes vis­i­ble and usable through the net­work ser­vices pro­vided. On the net­work, there are only ser­vices. So, the per­cep­tion of qual­ity of ref­er­ence or of the value of par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tions, for exam­ple, will depend for many peo­ple on the qual­ity of the net­work ser­vices which make them vis­i­ble, and the extent to which they can be inte­grated into per­sonal learn­ing envi­ron­ments. Increas­ingly, this requires us to empha­size the net­work as an inte­gral design prin­ci­ple in library ser­vice devel­op­ment, rather than think­ing of it as an add – on. The pro­vi­sion of RSS feeds is a case in point. Think­ing about how some­thing might appear on a mobile device is another.”

  Reply