16 · Survey Results: Executive Summary
collections. Targeted workshops for faculty often in-
volve focusing on how digital collections can help
enhance the visibility of their work, while students
are shown what types of resources are available for
them to use for their coursework. Among the most
widely promoted collection is the campus’ institu-
tional repository (IR), which provides opportunities
for scholars and researchers to save and disseminate
their work. Adding content to the campus IR is a way
to grow the collection by targeting both faculty and
graduate students.
Instruction related to locally curated digital col-
lections may be integrated into other types of instruc-
tion courses. These are delivered both synchronously
through face-to-face sessions and asynchronously
via recorded webinars that are available throughout
the year. Depending on the resource, some sessions
are held for both the library’s permanent and student
staff, as well as the research or academic community
that they support. One library uses online tutorials
for students to highlight certain collections, topics, or
projects over others.
The frequency of instruction sessions ranges from
very infrequently (such as biennially), to as needed or
requested, to a few times a year, to 10 times per year,
to ongoing. The more infrequent sessions usually deal
with collections that were developed for a specific
class or that have an outreach plan to promote the col-
lection at least once when it is launched. Web tutorials
are generally available 24/7.
Forty-five of the responding libraries (65%) have
developed instructional materials to enable users to
most efficiently use the digital collections. Often these
resources are placed on the collection website, but
are not integrated into the collection itself. Teaching
syllabi are considered supplementary texts that are
placed in LibGuides or the campus course manage-
ment system instead of the collection website or IR.
One explanation for not including the content in the
collection itself is that the materials developed are
continually updated so adding them to the collections
would not be appropriate. To reach outside venues,
libraries have distributed educational materials to
“public schools, museums, conferences, and pub-
lic libraries.”
Integration into Research, Teaching, and Learning
Again, few of the responding libraries (11 or 16%) have
a policy on integrating digital collections into research,
teaching, and learning. Instead, these resources are
handled the same way as other library collections and
as part of the general mission of the library to integrate
the appropriate resource with the appropriate need
collections are discussed if there is a direct correlation
between the collection and an audience or a specific,
relevant need. Integration into research, teaching, and
learning is not usually considered to need a separate
policy to ensure that integration takes place. As one
respondent noted, “We just do it.”
Most of the responding libraries indicated that
collaborating with faculty is a means to build new
collections for both student and faculty scholarship
(57 or 95%), or to grow a collection that already ex-
ists (51 or 85%). Linking collections to the CMS (38 or
63%), collaborating on designing specific assignments
with the teaching faculty (37 or 62%), and providing
instruction (37 or 62%) round out the top methods
used to integrate locally curated digital collections.
Respondents’ comments revealed that collaborating
with students and specific campus researchers (e.g.,
digital humanists) are also methods to integrate these
resources into research, teaching, and learning.
About half of the respondents (30 or 48%) indicated
that they have identified other resources that need
to be added or developed to fully integrate locally
curated digital collections into research, teaching,
and learning. As expected, having appropriate staff-
ing—particularly with expertise in data management,
instructional design, publishing, author rights, and
digital humanities—is necessary for effective integra-
tion. Many of the respondents need resources and
system infrastructure for user engagement—includ-
ing dataset development tools, exhibit software, learn-
ing management software integration, or collabora-
tion/community tools for crowdsourcing manuscript
transcription, adding metadata, and tagging photos.
Adding new functionalities to the digital library re-
quires development of data portals, GIS tools, maker-
spaces, and multimedia resources, along with person-
nel with expertise in developing and/or using them.
Other commenters wanted additional usage data and
large-scale data analysis of large samples of content.
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