in several venues. Staff members of the archives at Boston University and Woodruff Library in Atlanta are together building a deeply integrated shared catalog of their holdings of the papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Into the project, they have drawn the scholarly editor of King’s papers, whose team is contributing the vast knowledge it has accumulated about attribution, dating, provenance, and people. The project is also now considering how to draw in a third archives, the King Center in Atlanta. The Integrating Digital Papyrology project based at Duke, with University Librarian Deborah Jakubs as one of the principal investigators, has gone a step beyond building a unified catalog by integrating three historically separate databases about essentially the same corpus of papyri: one containing bibliographic information another containing images of the papyri and the third containing transcriptions. Project staff are now in the process of adding an editorial overlay so that scholars can efficiently make new peer-reviewed entries into the database. The Mellon Foundation also recently made a grant to a group of university presses, led by the Indiana University Press, all of which specialize in the publication of ethnomusicology. These presses have chosen to use as part of their publishing platform the database of Indiana’s EVIADA project, a digital archives of ethnomusicological field video, so that primary source evidence can be closely linked to newly published monographs. There are many other examples that I could offer from Mellon-funded programs, including the Roman de la Rose Digital Library led by Stephen Nichols, the Parker Library on the Web at Stanford and Cambridge, Electronic Enlightenment at Oxford, the Founding Fathers’ papers at the University of Virginia, the Long Civil Rights Movement project at the University of North Carolina, and the Stalin archives at Yale. However, I hope I have said enough to convince you that a value proposition for special collections that is framed in terms of scholarly objectives is enormously attractive and opens a rich area for innovation and the pursuit of new lines of inquiry in a variety of scholarly fields. * * * * * Now, in closing, let me return to a question that I raised at the beginning: What, if anything, do the various slang expressions about archives and curating that I mentioned at the beginning say about the value today of special collections, whether in artifactual or digital form? A flip answer would be to quote George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote that “people exaggerate the value RLI 267 39 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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