and standardized classification schemes, and any that is vulnerable to destruction or disappearance without special treatment.”7 In this sense, special collections are those materials containing primary evidence for scholarship that require special treatment in their description or handling. A value proposition is important because the costs of these special treatments can be quite substantial. At its most simplistic, the value proposition for special collections is that scholarship broadly across fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences just cannot proceed without corollary investment in the acquisitions and carrying costs of the primary-source evidence needed to sustain and advance those scholarly fields. But how can or should a particular institution justify particular investments in particular kinds of collections? Tomes have been written on this more specific question. Institutional missions, areas of special expertise, previous investment in particular areas of scholarship, growth trajectories in new areas, and special opportunities presented by relationships with donors and private collectors are all among the factors that play a role in particular value propositions.8 It is undoubtedly the complex nature of the interaction of these factors that accounts for the wide and rich variation among research libraries and archives in the kinds and level of their investment in special collections. Added to the complex factors we know to be at work, the overall environment for scholarly communications has changed in startling ways and with these changes has emerged a new kind of conventional wisdom about special collections. Over the last 15 years there have been substantial not-for- profit and commercial investments in the electronic availability of back- and front-lists of journals and books that are of interest to scholars. What JSTOR, Project Muse, Elsevier and Wiley (among others) accomplished in the ‘90s for journals surely has many parallels to what Amazon, Google, and the Internet Archive (among others) have accomplished in the first decade of the new century for books. However, the massive Google books digitization project stands as a buoy marking the sea change that has occurred. As a way of taking account of these changes in the special collections arena, the conventional wisdom is to say that because books and serials are now more commonly available to wide audiences in the form of online networked information, what now makes libraries distinctive is not their book and serials holdings but their special collections.9 Building on this conventional wisdom, it seems to follow logically that the value proposition for institutional investment in special RLI 267 32 The Changing Role of Special Collections in Scholarly Communications ( 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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