Because special collections in the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences are full of primary-source materials, they are the fuel of scholarship in these areas. However, before making investments in them, libraries must answer: How would the investment advance existing lines of inquiry and open new ones? How would it make scholars and students more productive? Let me now offer for your consideration three potentially fruitful areas of activity for enhancing the value of special collections. Processing Special Collections First, while there are many well-known, well-described, and heavily used special collections, the overwhelming problem that many research librarians have articulated in multiple conference papers and reports is the mountain of collections that remain unprocessed. Carol Mandelreferred to the problem memorably as being like the “unwelcome white elephant” that eats you out of house and home.21 CLIR’s Hidden Collections program is one small attempt at a solution. Perhaps more important has been the growing adoption of the “more product, less process” approaches that Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner have so effectively advocated.22 Processing tools like the Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon have emerged and developers of both products are now working together to create a single unified product that consolidates the best features of each and is better designed to operate and interoperate with related open source tools such as OLE, the Open Library Environment, and CollectionSpace, which is a museum-oriented system. We still lack the equivalent of a bibliographic utility for the detailed descriptions of special collections.23 And because there is such a mountain of materials to be processed, not as much attention has been focused as it should be on methods for efficiently determining priorities. With Mellon support, a number of institutions have experimented with assessment tools to determine priorities for processing various types of collections. Although these tools now need to be accumulated, evaluated, and appropriately refined, libraries do need to use them more widely because it is amply clear from early experiments that they help focus library attention on the needs of scholars. Deep knowledge of the collections is simply not sufficient for determining priorities for processing. Priorities must also be assessed against RLI 267 36 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 Deep knowledge of the collections is simply not sufficient for determining priorities for processing. Priorities must also be assessed against criteria of scholarly value
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