Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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A recent ARL report that explored the potential role of digital repository services <strong>in</strong> regard to research
libraries also made a number of recommendations to address issues surround<strong>in</strong>g the systematic
collection and preservation of digital projects and their long-term curation. 695 This report observed that
digital repositories have begun to develop quite rapidly and are quickly becom<strong>in</strong>g a “key element of
research cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure.” In particular, the report proposed that research libraries should develop
strategies to reach out to researchers and scholars who have collected or created content that may have
grown beyond their ability to manage: “Where these collections are of high value, local processes are
needed to migrate early digital collections <strong>in</strong>to an <strong>in</strong>stitutionally-managed service environment” (ARL
2009b). Research by Palmer et al. (2009) also identified the catalog<strong>in</strong>g, collection, and curation of
digital materials, particularly the personal digital collections 696 of <strong>in</strong>dividual scholars, as important
strategic services to be provided by research libraries <strong>in</strong> the future.
The ARL report identified a number of other key issues that research libraries would need to address
and services they would need to provide to develop digital repositories that functioned as part of a
larger cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure. At the m<strong>in</strong>imum, they proposed that digital repositories would need to offer
the follow<strong>in</strong>g services: long-term digital preservation, ongo<strong>in</strong>g migration of content, access
management, dissem<strong>in</strong>ation of research, metadata and format management, various types of discovery
tools, digital publish<strong>in</strong>g, and data m<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g or other forms of text analysis. Along with these essential
services, the report urged that research libraries should beg<strong>in</strong> to develop services “around new content
and old content <strong>in</strong> new forms.”
While many repositories for research libraries had been orig<strong>in</strong>ally conceived of as storage services for
static PDFs of formally published faculty research output, the ARL report advocated that research
libraries must plan for the fact that their <strong>in</strong>stitutions produce “large and ever-grow<strong>in</strong>g quantities of
data, images, multimedia works, learn<strong>in</strong>g objects, and digital records” as well as recognize that “mass
digitization has launched a new scale of digital content collect<strong>in</strong>g.” This report also emphasized how
digital repositories will need to be able to <strong>in</strong>tegrate the diverse digital content that already exists and
that will cont<strong>in</strong>ue to grow far outside of library-managed environments:
Research practices will <strong>in</strong>creas<strong>in</strong>gly take advantage of strategies predicated on the availability
of large amounts of widely accessible, rather than isolated and sparse, data. Many primary
source materials support<strong>in</strong>g humanistic <strong>in</strong>vestigations—large corpora of texts, collections of
images, and collections of cultural materials—will be complemented by newly available and
discoverable materials from disparate sources outside of library collections. To draw on content
from these diverse sources, researchers will <strong>in</strong>tegrate use of library services and resources with
funder-supported resources, commercially provided resources, and services and resources
provided by other entities with<strong>in</strong> the academy. Consequently, librarians will have much less
control of the user experience than they currently do and will adopt more strategies that rely on
collaboration with users. For <strong>in</strong>stance, <strong>in</strong> areas such as curation and preservation of data,
librarians will be regularly curat<strong>in</strong>g with, not just for, researchers (ARL 2009b).
695 The ARL has also recently released a new report that more specifically exam<strong>in</strong>es the role of digital curation <strong>in</strong> terms of research libraries’ digital
preservation activities, with a brief section on the implications of digital curation for the digital humanities (Walters and Sk<strong>in</strong>ner 2011).
696 Palmer et al. have described these personal digital collections and their importance <strong>in</strong> great detail: “In the humanities, personal collections are the
equivalent of f<strong>in</strong>ely curated special collections that have been expertly selected and controlled for quality and application. Reread<strong>in</strong>g and note tak<strong>in</strong>g are
core functions with these collections. There is considerable potential for shar<strong>in</strong>g and reuse of these collections, but the provenance and context of the
materials from the scholar’s research perspective is a large part of the value that would need to be reta<strong>in</strong>ed and represented” (Palmer et al. 2009, 44). The
CHSE study of faculty use of digital resources <strong>in</strong> teach<strong>in</strong>g also noted the importance of personal digital collections (Harley et al. 2006a, Harley et al.
2006b).