Closing Plenary: Collections of Distinction: Adding Value to the Online Community of Visual Resources
Jason Roy has presented on the subject of digital collections and initiatives at the annual conferences of the Minnesota Digital Libraries (MDL), the Society of American Archivists Annual Conference, and the Archive-It Conference. Currently Head,
Digital Collections Unit & Interim Co-director,
Digital Library Development Lab, University of Minnesota Libraries, Jason fosters the creation of and access to research and scholarly material in digital form from within the collections of the Libraries and across the University of Minnesota. Making content available to users is an expectation shared by nearly every cultural organization. Often this means an increasing commitment to digitization and the use of online discovery tools for providing access. Since no one institution has the financial resources to digitize everything in their holdings, it is imperative that organizations identify and prioritize which collections most deserve their attention. This session will focus on approaches and methods of targeting those collections within your own institution that can provide the most value to users. By showcasing our own collections of distinction we can significantly impact the growing array of online visual resources now available to our community of users while still highlighting the uniqueness of each of our own holdings. In an era when it is all too easy for institutional administrations to view subscriptions to large image databases as a one size fits all solution to visual resources needs, a shift towards identifying what you have that's unique and getting it out there in a manner that makes your collection relevant to both your local users and the larger universe of image users becomes vital. Some VR collections have already begun this process. Recent success stories include the
accessCeramics collection, a pilot project organized by the Visual Resources Collection of Watzek Library and the Art Department of Lewis & Clark College , and the
Reed Digital Collections Artists' Books site at Reed College. We can also learn from projects still in the early stages of development, such as
Local Color: A Database of Art on Campus being developed at the University of Michigan (watch for updates & announcements on this project via the linked AAEL Blog). Jason's presentation will be followed by a moderated discussion, featuring a panel of respondents composed of VR professionals who have achieved various measures of success in creating and sharing collections of distinction.
