Building and Managing a Digital Collection in a Small Library

Abstract

The creation and management of digital library collections is a relatively new field of librarianship that nevertheless has produced a substantial literature. Because the development of digital information resources can be an expensive undertaking, it is not surprising that the institutional pioneers in digital development typically were large academic research libraries or federally funded agencies. As a result, librarians and information managers from such institutions have tended to dominate the professionaldiscourse on digitalization. At an April 2003 conference in Los Angeles presented by the Northeast Document Conservation Center, for example, the speakers were from Harvard University, Duke University, Cornell University, UCLA, the University of California–Berkeley, Columbia University, the Research Libraries Group, the National Archives and Records Administration,and the Library of Congress—hardly a representative cross-section of American libraries.1