handmade and vintage goods, routinely brings in shelter magazine editors, fashion designers and design bloggers to serve as ‘guest curators.’” And “promoters at Piano’s, a nightclub on the Lower East Side [of Manhattan], have recently announced on their Web site that they will ‘curate a night of Curious burlesque.” Now if all of your competitors are “curating” merchandise, you do not want to be known as someone who merely “buys and sells” and, similarly, if all your rival nightclub promoters are “curating” parties, why in the world would you want to be left to be merely “hosting” one?3 In 1995, I was simply astounded at how change in popular jargon was so closely tracking a controversial definitional change in more esoteric circles. You’ll remember that one of the results of the task force was to loosen the definition of archival practice and extend some of its core concepts to define the practice of collecting and preserving digital information.4 This definitional extension has now largely been accepted and even superseded, but at the time of its formulation, it was met with howls of protest from purists who felt that the task force was demeaning the value of true archival work by describing work on the ephemera of bits and bytes in the same terms. Find your own word, they said.5 And today here we go again as the popular culture is closely tracking a more esoteric extension of the meaning of the term “curation” from museum practice to the definition of how effectively to manage and preserve floods of digital data produced by sensors of various kinds including telescopes, gene sequencers, and book scanners.6 What, if anything, do these various semantic extensions say about the value today of special collections, whether in artifactual or digital form? I will return to this specific question at the end of this paper. In the meantime, I want to explore some ideas about how best to construct the value proposition justifying investment in special collections, and about the areas of work that are likely to be most fruitful to advance scholarly communications. The Definition of Special Collections “Special collections” is used in various senses for various purposes, sometimes referring simply to rare books and manuscript materials, and sometimes more generally to materials that are used as primary sources of evidence as opposed to secondary sources. In the recent working group report on Special Collections in ARL Libraries, “special collections” are defined “ecumenically” to include “any kind of vehicle for information and communication that lacks readily available RLI 267 31 The Changing Role of Special Collections in Scholarly Communications ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
Previous Page Next Page