Library Board of Trustees Agenda and Packet 2011 09 28

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PERSPECTIVES Without funding from the federal government and a nonprofit project, neither Defiance nor any of the public libraries in Ohio's 88 counties all of which participate in Ohio Memory would likely be able to make this information accessible at all, and they certainly would not be able to link the photographs to each other in a consistent, search- able interface. Digitization made the Bronson Collection usable by a much wider audience than people who could make it through the Public Library. Another example is Digital Amherst, a project of the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass. In 2010, ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) recognized the Jones Library as one of three libraries that best used cutting -edge technology in library services. A digital multimedia repository on the history of Amherst, this project is a unique example of a standalone digital portal created by a public library that was experiencing "heavy use" of its special collections and relied on "local community members and academics to help create and provide content for the digital library. Images from the Digital Amherst collection are appearing online for example, on the website for the Emily Dickinson Museum. Other projects, such as Greater Rochester History Online and the Oshkosh Public Library's Digital Collections (in Michigan and Wisconsin, respectively) also allow for Although significant exception Case Study: Saving Newspapers A consistently searchable, more usable collection would help researchers looking at the Sentinel newspapers housed at the Clapp Memorial Library in Belchertown, Mass. The historic newspaper represents a "week -by- week history" of the community, and the library keeps hard copies; issues from 1915 through 2004 on microfilm; and issues from 2004 through the present on disks. doors of the Defiance 4 I Digitizing Hidden Collections in Public Libraries online access to public libraries' collections. these examples represent accomplishments, they are the rather than the rule. Digitizing local collections in public libraries re- mains largely un- explored but offers tremendous oppor- tunities. Moreover, these collections and many others contain historically valuable materials that should not exist in isolation. If they were linked to larger projects, their educational and historical usefulness would increase exponentially, and more users would gain access to the material. Challenges for Smaller Institutions Most smaller institutions, especially those located in states without strong consortia, face high barriers to entry into the digitization world. While more and more people use (and want to use) libraries' materials online and with mobile devices, smaller institutions generally have the most severe resource constraints in supporting digitization projects. Budget- strapped public libraries, for example, do not have the funding, time, staffing, or access to expertise and technology to devote to large -scale technical projects. Even if they did manage to create high quality digital files, these libraries typically lack the means to promote them widely. Undoubtedly, some materials suffer not only from inadequate organization and