Page 189 - DLIS001_FOUNDATION_OF_LIBRARY_AND_INFORMATION_SCIENCE

Foundation of Library and Information Science

Notes
Example: Items would be electronic books, journals, and datasets.

Access to external materials not held in-house by providing pointers to Web sites, other
library collections, or publishers’ servers.
While the third method may not exactly constitute part of a local collection, it is still a method
of increasing the materials available to local users. One of main issues here is the degree to
which libraries will digitize existing materials and acquire original digital works, as opposed to
simply pointing to them externally. This a reprise of the old access versus ownership issue—but
in the digital realm—with many of the same concerns such as:

local control of collections
long-term access and preservation
What about digital collection building in a coordinated scheme? There are many reasons why
building digital collections is a good candidate for coordinated activity. Firstly, acquiring digital
works and doing in-house digitization are expensive, especially to undertake alone. By working
together, institutions with common goals can gain greater efficiencies and reduce the overall
costs involved in these activities, as was the case with retrospective conversion of bibliographic
records. Secondly, it also reduces the redundancy and waste of acquiring or converting materials
more than once. Thirdly, coordinated digital collection building enhances resource sharing and
increases the richness of collections to which users have access.

How can specific materials to be processed by a given institution be identified? Who collects
and/or digitizes what materials could be based on factors such as:

Collection strengths: A particular library with a strong collection focus could be responsible
for digitizing selected portions of it and adding new digital works to it.
Unique collections: If a library has the only copies of something, they are obviously the
ones to digitize it.
The priorities of user communities: Such priorities will justify holding the materials locally,
for example, because of the demands of a curriculum.
Manageable portions of collections: When there is no other overriding criteria, then material
can be divided up among institutions simply according to what is reasonable for any one
institution to collect or digitize.
Technical architecture: The state of a library’s technical architecture will also be factor in
selecting who digitizes what. A library must have a technical architecture up to the task of
support a particular digital collection.
Skills of staff: Institutions whose staff doesn’t have the necessary skills can’t become a
major node in a national scheme.
Yet, no matter how a collection is built-of materials digitized in-house, of original digital
works, or of providing access to materials by pointing to other external resources—libraries in
a collective must ensure it is preserved and made available in perpetuity.

Task If the only copies of digital works reside on a particular publisher’s server, then
what happens if the publisher goes bankrupt?

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