WRLC Digital Collections Production Center (DCPC) Guidebook
Selecting Collections
There are several different kinds of related collections which play different roles and have different characteristics:
- Archival (physical) collection: original material housed in library special collections or archives department, made available onsite for use by researchers
- Digital collection: digital representation of some or all items in the archival collection, made available for online searching and display of individual digital items
- Online exhibit: a distinct subset of digital items selected and presented online, usually with new descriptive material and often a predefined sequence of presentation.
The DCPC is designed to support development of digital collections. The digital collection is not necessarily intended to completely replicate the archival collection -- the most serious researchers will always need to work with the original materials. Rather, the digital collection is intended to provide online access to meaningful subsets of the archival collection, to promote awareness of the full archival collection, and, especially important, to bring archival materials to the attention of searchers who may not have known to search there.
The characteristics of a good digital collection may be somewhat different than the characteristics of a good archival collection. When selecting collections for digital conversion, libraries should consider such factors as:
- Does the collection contain visual materials (photographs, graphics) or audio/video materials that would make good use of online display or performance capabilities?
- If the collection is largely text, would the content support and benefit from key word searching, i.e. by OCR conversion or transcription?
- Has the collection been processed sufficiently to include basic descriptive information about each item, or can such information easily be derived from the items themselves?
- Does the library have the right to digitize and disseminate the materials in the collection? If the copyright is held by other parties, can permission be obtained in a timely manner?
- Is the collection of a manageable size or can it be divided into meaningful subcollections for online use?
- Does the collection complement other WRLC digital collections and expand the scope of a particular topic?
The project should be planned to make a meaningful collection or subcollection available to users in the shortest time possible. Plans for large collections may involve multiple phases for multiple subprojects, or later phases for providing additional descriptive metadata. Often this will require focusing first on certain materials within the original collection and/or certain kinds of readily-available descriptive metadata, with a plan to add items or metadata on an ongoing basis. DCPC staff will work closely with the owning library to define the project or subprojects.
