22 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
POLICIES AND PLATFORMS
1. Does your library have formal collection management policies or informal guidelines in place
for locally curated digital collections? (They may be associated with digitization, outreach and
assessment, or staffing policies for specific collections). Please select one choice per row. N=69
Collection Management
Policy
Yes,
formal
policy
Yes,
informal
guidelines
Formal policy
planned in the
next 1–3 years
Informal
guidelines
planned in the
next 1–3 years
No
policy or
guidelines
N
Digitization 23 33 12 1 69
Assessment and Evaluation 7 21 14 7 19 68
Outreach 4 28 9 7 19 67
Total Number of Responses 26 45 20 11 25 69
Comments N=17
A lot of effort is put into maintaining all aspects of digital collections, but it is driven more by preservation. That said,
access is a vital component of preservation, and therefore understanding users and uses is important on multiple fronts.
Currently, our policies for digitization relate to best practices for imaging and metadata and adherence to copyright law.
Assessment and evaluation are conducted as part of annual reporting and feedback from patrons—sometimes through
social media. Outreach efforts relate to programming and exhibits, and bibliographic instruction.
Digital Library of Georgia has a digitization policy none of the other areas (Russell, Hargrett, or Brown Media Archives)
have one. Russell and Media have informal guidelines for assessment/evaluation and outreach.
Each digitization proposal must include an outreach/marketing plan.
Formal policies exist for the institutional repository, but other digital collections have information policies.
Formal policies govern digitization of content for Variations, Digital Music Library.
It is important to note that we have several different types of digital collections, primarily our “digital collections,” which
are primarily digitized special collections and born-digital archival content and our “institutional repository,” which is
where we house our ETDs, faculty publications, and, in future, research data. These two content types are in separate
repositories, and while we are increasingly moving towards more uniformity between the repositories, some of the
answers to these questions may be applicable to one and not the other. We will try to make it clear.
NLM’s History of Medicine Division envisions crafting and implementing such a policy during the stated timeframe.
No clear answers for the first two it depends on the digital project. For Digitization, I could have chosen yes, formal, or
yes, informal for Assessment, yes, formal, or no policy, or guidelines depending on the project.
Our collection management policy intentionally includes digital collections. The Libraries have a number of digital
collections, including those based in Special Collections and University Archives, Scholarly Communication, the Image
Collection Library, and a national disciplinary repository for nanomanufacturing. Because the collections have different
approaches (with some overarching practices), we filled out this survey to represent the practices of only one collection,
ScholarWorks, the institutional repository.
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