Collection Development and Management Issues

Mark Phillips

AALL 2011

July 23, 2011

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Who?

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What?

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Where?

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When?

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Why?

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How?

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But lets re-order those for this talk

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Why?

What?

How?

Who?

Where?

When?

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Why?

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Why are you interested in digitizing content?

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Is there something specific that needs work?

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Can your institution sustain a project?

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Are there opportunities to collaborate?

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There are many reasons to start a project.

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Inadequate access

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Local needs

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Building local capacity

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An itch to scratch

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Having a why is important

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In some cases the “why” doesn’t make sense to

everyone.

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But you need to have a reason for starting down

this road.

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What?

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What is it that you are interested in working on?

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What is important to your institution?

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Your library?

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Your users?

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Your community?

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Has your content been digitized already?

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Was it done well?

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What are the rights associated with it?

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Does it just need some tweaking or does it need

to be done again from scratch?

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Is digitizing content the right direction for you?

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Allow me to digress...

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Have you thought about working with born-digital

content?

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In many ways isn't it the most at risk?

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We spend so much time pointing to things on the

web.

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We don't “collect” this content unless someone

packages it up for us.

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If someone packages it up we buy it.

Because it is good content.

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Much of this content isn't well described.

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And is very likely to disappear

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Don't bet on the kindness and forward thinking of

groups like the Internet Archive

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Take some action.

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Pick an important publication or dataset and

acquire and curate it for you and others.

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Everyone do this...

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Really... you should do this.

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An example

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Environmental Policy Collection

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Back to the regularly schedule broadcast

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The rest of the presentation applies to all projects.

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How?

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How are you going to acquire the content?

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Do you own it?

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What condition is it in?

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Do you have other copies?

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Are you in a position to perform destructive

digitization?

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Are you trying to preserve the original with

digitization or just trying to provide access to the

content between the covers?

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Is your source material even paper?

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Microfilm? Microfiche? MicroCard?

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Do you have a system for managing this content?

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A digital library system?

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A digital preservation system?

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Do you have support from various stakeholders

around the library?

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Collection developers?

Digital library staff?

Research Services?

Library or Campus IT?

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Especially that last one

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That can make or break a project.

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Do you have standards for your project?

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Do you have a workflow?

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Who?

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Who comes in may levels

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High level:

Are you doing this project alone or with others?

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Another institution?

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A consortium?

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Are there others interested in this same content?

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Does it make sense to share the work?

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Lower level:

Who in the organization will be responsible?

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Is it another group or is it going to be you?

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Lowest level:

Who is actually going to do the work?

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Will you do it internally?

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Staff time? Student time? Volunteer time?

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Will you get someone else to do the work?

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Contract with a vendor?

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Will you need an RFP?

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Does your workflow allow for multiple people to

interact with it at once?

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Where?

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Do you have adequate space to stage a project?

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A dozen or so books/items is pretty straight

forward.

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What happens when a handful turns into shelves?

Carts?

Ranges?

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Staging of content before, during and after is

important.

Especially for valuable content.

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Where is also important for the digital stuff.

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Local Computer?

Network Storage?

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How much will you need?

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How much do you have?

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How close are those numbers?

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When the project is completed, where does the

digital content go?

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When?

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What are you timeframes?

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Is there an important date coming up?

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Building opening?

Anniversary?

Conference?

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Plan around these.

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Wrapping up...

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The nice thing about digital projects is that they

are useful at all levels

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Large projects are important.

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Small highly curated projects are important.

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As is everything else.

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You can only learn this process by doing

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Pick a small pilot and get started

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Ask questions

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Work with others

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These are new skills we had to all learn

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questions?

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mark.phillips@unt.edu

http://digital.library.unt.edu

http://texashistory.unt.edu