6 See for example the wonderful work of Christopher Blackwell at Furman University in this area this is discussed in Christopher Blackwell and Thomas R. Martin, “Technology, Collaboration, and Undergraduate Research,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 1 (Winter 2009), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000024.html. The interested reader will also find several other articles of interest dealing with collaborative research and documentation of imaged classics manuscript materials in this issue. See also Blackwell’s presentation, “Renewing Scholarship: A QEP-Funded Workshop on Undergraduate Research, http://www.class.uh.edu/mcl/classics/ UH_QEP/presentation.html. I’m indebted to Amy Friedlander of CLIR for introducing me to Blackwell’s work. 7 For a well-documented recent example of this, see the report on the experience of the US Library of Congress in mounting image collections on Flickr Commons, available online at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html. 8 Clifford A. Lynch, “Repatriation, Reconstruction, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Digital World,” EDUCAUSE Review 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 70–71, http://www.educause.edu/library/erm08110. 9 See http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/, and also Helen Shenton, “Virtual Reunification, Virtual Preservation, and Enhanced Conservation,” submitted to the Rare Books and Manuscripts, Preservation, Conservation, and Library History division of the 75 th IFLA General Conference and Council, Milan, Italy, August 23–27, 2009, http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla75/163-shenton- en.pdf. More broadly, see Anne Marie Austenfeld, “Virtual Reunification as the Future of ‘codices dispersi’: Practices and Standards Developed by e-codices Virtual Library of Switzerland,” submitted to the same conference, http://www.ifla.org/files/hq/papers/ifla75/163-austenfeld-en.pdf. 10 See the Endangered Archives Web site, http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/ homepage.html. See also, for example, the programs to digitize endangered archives in Timbuktu, e.g., John Noble Wilford, “Project Digitizes Works from the Golden Age of Timbuktu,” New York Times, May 20, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/science/20timb.html?_r=1&emc=eta1. 11 See the Afghanistan Digital Library, http://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/. 12 For a discussion of Rushdie’s archives at Emory, see Mary J. Loftus, “Rushdie Hour,” Emory Magazine, Spring 2008, http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/2008/spring/rushdie.html. More generally, see the 2008 white paper by Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use,” http://www.neh.gov/ODH/ Default.aspx?tabid=111&id=37. 13 See the Digital Lives Web site, http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives/, in particular the material from the February 2009 First Digital Lives Research Conference, and especially Simson Garfinkle and David Cox, “Finding and Archiving the Internet Footprint,” http://www.simson.net/webprint.pdf. See also Neil Beagrie, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom? Personal Digital Libraries and Collections,” D-Lib Magazine, June 2005, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june05/beagrie/06beagrie.html. Also see Kieron O’Hara, Richard Morris, Nigel Shadbolt, Graham J. Hitch, Wendy Hall, and Neil Beagrie, “Memories for Life: A Review of the Science and Technology,” Journal of the Royal Society Interface 3, no. 8 (June 2006): 351–365. And see Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (New York: Dutton, 2009). 14 See Sayeed Choudhury and Timothy L. Stinson, “The Virtual Observatory and the Roman de la Rose: Unexpected Relationships and the Collaborative Imperative,” Academic Commons, December 16, 2007, http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/VO-and-roman-de-la-rose-collaborative- imperative see also Clifford A. Lynch, “The Impact of Digital Scholarship on Research Libraries,” Journal of Library Administration 49, no. 3 (April 2009): 227–244. © 2009 Clifford A. Lynch This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/. To cite this article: Clifford A. Lynch. “Special Collections at the Cusp of the Digital Age: A Credo.” Research Library Issues: A Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 267 (Dec. 2009): 3–9. http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/rli/ archive/rli267.shtml. RLI 267 9 Special Collections at the Cusp of the Digital Age: A Credo ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC