Digital Special Collections: the Big Picture

Alice Prochaska Digital Special Collections: The Big Picture AS I STARTED TO THINK about digital special collections, I found myself pitching into a morass of unknown quantities and speculation. The dominance of electronic journals and aggregations of databases, followed by the news-grabbing mass digitization program at Google, has diverted attention from the fact that some publishers and libraries have been digitizing special collections for a couple of decades or more. For most of that time, an even greater number have been evangelizing the benefits of digital access to unique and rare materials. There was a time when I thought I had a clear vision of the future for sharing digitized versions of special collections with the world of scholarship and researchers far and wide. Making high-quality images of special collections available on the Internet has opened up for archivists, curators, and librarians some dizzying possibilities. We now find our collections at the center of our libraries’ attention far more often than they were twenty years ago. We have a new set of choices in the realms of preservation, reformatting, and security. We are able to pursue high ideals for sharing a common cultural and historical inheritance by digitizing rare and unique materials for a worldwide audience. Now we can return the documentation of traditional cultures in digitized versions to the communities from which those collections originally came. We play new roles, with new partners, in placing “our” collections at the heart of the learning and educational experience. New forms of research develop, facilitated by the materials that we bring into the scholarly domain and the links and software developments that we create with our colleagues in information technology and the electronic industries. The digitization of special collections has always been a complicated picture. Com- plicated by problems of scarce resources, and expectations that continually outrun the available technology and expertise. Complicated by politics, legal issues, and organizational boundaries. Complicated very often by the ways in which cultural and historical ownership interacts with the responsibilities and values involved in stewardship of the original materials in our care. Often, for example, the very communities we seek to serve, or ought to serve, are also those from which our special collections derive. Ownership issues in the digital environment are no simpler than those surrounding physical artifacts. Given the acceleration of mass digitiza- 13 14 RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage tion, the continuing conflicts between publishers and libraries that show no sign of reaching resolution, and an exponential increase in the technical solutions that are on offer, visions of the future seem even more elusive. We deploy in our community words like “discovery,” “exposure,” and “disclosure” (or, at a more detailed level of specificity, “preliminary record” or “collection level record”) as if one of these, despite the nuanced differences in their meaning, holds the key to the evolving policies that we must formulate and embrace. In a gather- ing of experts in this field, one ventures with trepidation to define the “big picture,” knowing that every chosen word potentially carries with it a host of different mean- ings. We live in an age when words are often carelessly thrown around or intention- ally misinterpreted, resulting in giving and taking offence and generally massacring the meaning of everything. I do not wish to “misunderestimate” the potential for misunderstanding in the topic before us. But I do hope, to quote Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play, The Rivals, written over two hundred years ago, that as I venture forward in this difficult and sometimes contested field, I can do so without attracting too many “aspersions on my parts of speech.” What are Special Collections Today, and What Will They Be in the Future? In 2007, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) established a Special Collections Working Group, which I currently chair, made up of ARL library directors, heads of special collections, and several ARL leadership fellows from special collections libraries.1 Members of the working group seek to learn from and build on the large bodies of work that have already been done in this area, including that of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the American Library Association, as well as the predecessor of our own group, the ARL Special Collections Task Force (2001–2006), which had already made an impact on the special collections agenda in ARL libraries.2 The Working Group on Special Collections is charged with: advising the Research, Teaching, and Learning Steering Committee [of ARL] on special collections issues on an ongoing basis. In this context, “special collections” is construed broadly to include distinctive material in all media and attendant library services.3 1. ARL Special Collection Working Group homepage, www.arl.org/rtl/speccoll/spcollwg/#special (Accessed March 3, 2009). 2. ARL Special Collections Task Force homepage, www.arl.org/rtl/speccoll/spcolltf/index.shtml (Accessed March 3, 2009). 3. ARL Special Collections Working Group charge, www.arl.org/bm~doc/speccolwg-2-23.pdf (Ac- cessed March 3, 2009). Digital Special Collections: The Big Picture 15 The two issues that the Steering Committee identifies as the first priorities for the attention of the Working Group are to: 1. Identify opportunities and recommend actions for ARL and other orga- nizations that will encourage concerted action and coordinated planning for collecting and exposing 19th- and 20th-century materials in all formats (rare books, archives and manuscripts, audio, video, and the like). 2. Identify criteria and strategies for collecting digital and other new media material that currently lack a recognized and responsible structure for stewardship.4 These two issues are closely linked since much valuable material in many different formats remains uncollected and at risk of being permanently lost. We need to develop coordinated strategies for identifying, collecting, preserving, and exposing these materials if we are to be successful. I ought to make clear here, in case anyone doubts it, that the focus of the ARL group is not intended to suggest that materials predating the nineteenth century are unimportant or not at risk: it is simply a pragmatic attempt to give to the group a manageable task. While international efforts are already underway to support the digitization of 19th- and 20th-century newspapers and books, even more are needed. Yet even before such work is possible, the culturally significant materials from these periods must first be identified and acquired, and both of these tasks are ultimately the responsi- bility of individual libraries and archival repositories. ARL can provide the leadership for encouraging collective activities, which include (but are not limited to) collection analysis (in other words, determining if and where gaps in the collection may oc- cur); coordination of efforts; and encouraging the use of a “preliminary record” for identifying and making accessible collections that would otherwise remain hidden. In addition to noting the top priorities in their charge, the Working Group also identified some general issues that should be addressed, including: • identifying examples of how special collections contribute to innovative research, teaching, and learning; • contributing to the work underway within ARL to develop qualitative and quantitative measures for the evaluation of special collections (which might include a target for surfacing hidden collections and mechanisms for tracking progress); 4. Ibid. 16 RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage • contributing to and/or validating the work being done by the ACRL/ RBMS Core Competencies Task Force to define the skills needed for work in special collections.5 Periodically, the Research, Teaching, and Learning Steering Committee of ARL (which is the umbrella committee for this working group) may ask it for advice on other issues. For example, once the Steering Committee discusses a report from the ARL Task Force on the Future of Preservation in ARL Libraries, the Working Group may be asked to address the preservation strategies for special collections in both physical and electronic spheres. In the context of this charge to the ARL Working Group on Special Collections, I would like to add some of my own thoughts on the subject. We are all, I believe, obliged to take stock of the way we define “special collections” in the modern world, beyond merely asking questions about special collections in a digital environment. We should also consider how we have construed our responsibilities for these materials from centuries past. The leaders of ARL libraries, which contain some of the largest concentrations of special collections, are acutely conscious of this issue. It has been a common experience in the research community, often in response to new scholarship or because we ourselves have led scholars toward neglected material, to rediscover the intrinsic value of different sorts of materials, eventually leading to revelatory new insights. To use one category of special collections as a metaphor, consider the case of print- ed ephemera. At one time, few libraries collected in this area beyond the fugitives and strays that may have been slipped between the pages of rare books,

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