Digital Special Collections: The Big Picture

Abstract

As I started to think about digital special collections, I found myself pitching into a morass of unknown quantities and speculation. The dominance of electronic journals and aggregations of databases, followed by the news-grabbing mass digitization program at Google, has diverted attention from the fact that some publishers and libraries have been digitizing special collections for a couple of decades or more. For most of that time, an even greater number have been evangelizing the benefits of digital access to unique and rare materials. There was a time when I thought I had a clear vision of the future for . . .