68 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
27. Please enter any additional information that may assist the authors’ understanding of your
library’s outreach, assessment, and integration with teaching and research for locally curated
digital collections. N=18
As a general response, we consider our digital collections to be just another format among many. Metadata for the
digital files is integrated in our catalog. There are digital collections distributed throughout the library. We do not
segregate digital from other object types in our collections in terms of either access to them or their use in instruction/
outreach. Nor do we single them out for assessment. The survey really doesn’t fit our situation.
As part of our outreach mission and integration with teaching and research, we provide education about Creative
Commons licenses, copyright, author rights, and fair use of content.
Essential to our strategy is the idea that publications, data, and archival materials are used differently by faculty and
require different focus of service and outreach.
I find these questions somewhat difficult to answer, and based on assumptions that we should do more to assess digital
collections than we do analog collections, and more to integrate such collections into teaching and learning, than we
expect to do with analog collections. This implies that digital collections are not yet seen as mainstream, and that we
are insecure as to whether our users perceive the value of locally curated digital collections. I think we will soon get past
that.
Increasingly our work in the digital realm is simply the work of the library. Digital technology enables all kinds of new
possibilities, but it is also the way we get things done. Digitization is key to our preservation strategy for physical
materials. “Digital” activities are spreading throughout the library, and less concentrated in a particular department.
Our collections consist of mostly ETD and archival collections of cultural heritage material. For ETDs, the outreach has
mostly been through the items being searchable on Google and Google Scholar. For the cultural heritage materials,
outreach is done by our local archive. They use traditional methods to track citations and usage. We just do scanning for
them. For a smaller percentage of our collections we digitize items for faculty members or departments and make them
available. These items are mostly promoted within the departments by the sponsors.
Our library DOES have a communications director who handles high-level outreach and promotion of our collections. In
most cases, however, we look at our collections has a cohesive unit based on content and not on format, so we would
utilize content because of what is about, and not about what type it is (analog/digital, etc.)
The library has recently hired an Assessment Librarian who will begin to address these issues.
The library is transitioning to a new organizational structure that includes more formal initiatives for its outreach and
assessment efforts for all functions and services.
The primary objective for future assessment activities will be to understand the impact on research and teaching of
digitized collections.
The survey seems geared towards institutions with more centralized digital collections. We take a more curatorial
approach. Also, we have many digital collections that are accessible in the confines of the reading room, but are
not available online. Finally, we take a more holistic approach to outreach and assessment (both analog and online
collections are covered in our public programming).
This survey seems to assume library digital collections function (or should?) primarily as resources for research and
teaching. By contrast, digital humanities projects are often themselves the vehicle for teaching (through student
participation in a project, sometimes in connection with an education program) as opposed to product created at the
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