Page 20 - Building Digital Libraries

Getting Started

connected to specialized platforms optimized for tasks such as
mapping, bioimaging, and certain types of social media require
the library to permanently commit support for specialized plat-
forms and skill sets. Permanently dedicating limited resources
for such services—especially when they duplicate services avail-
able elsewhere—delivers questionable benefits to library users.
The library does not become the appropriate entity to
ar chive and manage a resource simply because no one else is
doing so and the resource is deemed to be valuable. Just as
many types of resources in the physical world are not preserved,
the same is true of digital materials. It simply isn’t viable to do
everything people want, and so a serious examination is needed
of how a project fits within the library’s mission before perma-
nently committing money and staff to maintain a custom appli-
cation that awkwardly harvests and stores a specific resource,
thus making money and staff unavailable for other priorities.

How will resources be acquired, managed, and accessed?
The value that libraries contribute is in the selection, organiza-
tion, and presentation of materials. They select materials that
have value, they organize these materials in meaningful con-
texts, and they present them in ways that help the user. Just
as a major difference between a museum and a landfill is that
the former selects relevant items which are organized and pre-
sented in meaningful contexts, while the latter accepts what-
ever people bring, a repository must decide what it will contain
and how to make those resources meaningful to users.
Digital materials present many of the same challenges as
physical resources. Just as successful libraries have robust col-
lection development policies and dedicate significant resources
to catalog and organize physical resources, these things are also
needed for digital materials—a successful outcome is unlikely
if the collection development policy is to expect users to donate
materials that they organize themselves. Regardless of format,
the library plays a critical role in identifying materials that are
organized into useful contexts and managed so that they are
relevant for users. Nothing lasts forever, so an important com-
ponent of a plan is to describe what happens when the library
needs to get rid of objects or collections via deaccessioning or
transferring the assets to another institution.
Some types of resources present special acquisition and
processing challenges. Large files of any sort are difficult to
transmit over network connections. Complex objects and those
consisting of many items present ingestion, metadata, organiza-
tion, and display issues. Many types of resources are produced
by specific systems that the repository needs to interact with.
The appropriate mechanism depends on many factors, but the
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