that permanent funding, along with requirements for collaboration, efficiency, and policy development must come from the top. Archivists and special collections librarians must constantly demonstrate alignment with the organizational mission, engage institutional colleagues and provide evidence of how less-compelling topics contribute to research, teaching, and learning. Ken Hamma specifically noted the slow, iterative nature of incorporating special collections into the enterprise, requiring persistent reframing of special collections in the context of institutional goals. The current financial environment precipitates the need to share models for integrating special collections into the main information-management and discovery workflows in the research library. Digital and Collaboration Are Necessary Special collections present opportunities for research libraries to enrich transformations affecting research and research-intensive institutions. Libraries and their special collections have a strong record of embracing the digital information environment and collaboration to support changing modes of research. Yet presenters urged that more attention be given to developing and ensuring sustainability and building solid infrastructure in both areas. Speakers promoted the digitization of collections as key to connecting special collections with users, but quickly moved beyond the advantages of digital surrogates to the expanded options presented by the digital world. Collections can be transformed online for example, providing access to details that cannot be seen with the naked eye and reuniting pieces of disparate collections virtually. Will Noel shared astonishing examples of digital transformation and rediscovery of unique items based on his work with the Archimedes Palimpsest and other projects at the Walters Art Gallery. Richard Saloman highlighted the emerging capability to create globally interacting, digital, special collections in his description of the Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project. These and other presentations demonstrated that real transformation occurs when digital collections are turned over to the users for unexpected interpretation and reuse. In order to facilitate original and creative knowledge building such as non- consumptive research, mash-ups, and “citizen science,” libraries must do more to establish a stable foundation on which users can work. Large-scale digitization open access flexible, minimal, automated metadata user-friendly RLI 267 14 Moving Special Collections Forward in an Age of Discovery: Themes from the ARL-CNI Forum ( C O N T I N U E D ) DECEMBER 2009 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A BIMONTHLY REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC
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