The blog of www.chuukaku.com

Another theme of the conference was digitisation, and as one of my main interests is in the use of technology in libraries both of the parallel sessions I attended focused on this theme. Alice Prochaska from Yale University spoke to the whole conference about the opportunity for libraries to exploit their special collections as a "unique and distinctive" resource in the information age. The major question to be asked in doing this, however, was "how do we prioritise our digitisation programmes?" and several speakers over the course of the conference gave their opinions.

A session themed around OCLC's Shifting Gears paper, led by John MacColl, argued for mass digitisation - getting as much 'out there' as possible so that collections could be sifted through by researchers rather than librarians. A number of strategies were put forward for this - from 'scan on demand' to simple 'scan the first one and keep going' strategies. However, researchers still have to find the digitised information. One issue identified in the following JISC / RLUK session was that collections tend to be available through individual portals, and designing usability and interoperability into these has not been a priority. The other, recurring throughout the conference was whether to add metadata at the collection level, at the level of items, and whether user tagging could substitute for / add to metadata added by librarians - I'm a fan of the tagging route, but it was interesting to see the range of (passionate) opinions on whether it was a good idea!

Again collaboration rose as a core theme, with the collaboration between JISC, JSTOR and the pamphlet owners on the 19th century pamphlet collection an interesting example - JSTOR provide the infrastructure for storing / accessing the collection. The difficulties (and opportunities!) of working with commercial partners were something I hadn't seen spelled out in concrete terms before, and again the OCLC Good Terms report on such collaborations seems like a useful resource.

Finally, and particularly up my street, the difficulty of storing born digital information was considered. At RLUK the focus was very much on how to store websites / pages, and whether regulatory backing could be achieved to allow this to happen. This discussion came up again recently for me in the context of Game City where the National Videogame Archive was launched. Videogames can be 'born digital' but they are associated with physical media, such as cartridges, and other physical materials such as instruction booklet and inserts. Digitisation of materials sounded like such a simple concept before I started digging!

Labels: computer games, conferences, digitisation, RLUK Conference, special collections