Digital Collection Building: Not Just for Digital Libraries!

This week I read an article, written by an academic librarian in Scotland (feel free to read the rest of this post in a brogue), that seeks to weigh the respective values of digital and traditional collection building in the context of lean economic times. (I wonder where that idea came from.)

Intrinsic to the argument is the postulate that to build a digital collection effectively and to build a traditional print collection effectively one must make a significant investment of roughly equal size. Furthermore, Nicholas Joint (the author) assumes that libraries will not necessarily possess the budget to engage fully in both activities. Thus, Joint presents the dilemma facing librarians as a choice between embracing a digital future and focusing on digital collection building or maintaining current practices and continuing to purchase paper books.

Joint's arguments come in two phases. First, he cites some usage statistics from Scotland. Apparently, the circulation rate in Scotland is only about fifty percent of the collection size, which is actually really good as far as academic libraries go. (As someone who has traveled to Edinburgh in February, I can attest that there is indeed probably a lot of reading go on indoors.) However, the same libraries found that each digital item in the collection was downloaded twenty times within a school year. While there are some validity issues with the statistics, namely that the university only possessed three thousand presumably popular digital titles, usage statistics seem to suggest that even conventional libraries may wish to devote greater resources to digital collection building than print acquisitions.

The second phase of Joint's argument is theoretical. In the article, he compares to works on digital publishing and the emergence of the ebook as a medium. One, Luke Tredinnick's Digital Information Culture: the Individual and Society in the Digital Age essentially argues that a new digital culture has either already emerged or is emerging and that not only is resistance futile, but that it will be doomed to appear to future generations as a socially-conservative backlash akin to fears of erosion of values wrought by tv. Conversely, in Never Mind the Web, Here Comes the Book, Miha Kovač argues that everyone is misinterpreting the term ebook. All books nowadays start in electronic or digital form and yet get transformed to print objects because that is how users prefer to engage them. As such, print collections will continue to be supreme according to Kovac.

Ultimately, Joint decides that Tredinnick possesses the stronger argument. Joint views print-outs as little more than useful transitions of essentially digital books. He points out that no one donates printouts of ejournals to libraries. For this reason, as well as the statistical one, Joint recommends that libraries devote more of their resources to building digital collections than traditional print collections.

I found the argument interesting primarily as an example that digital curation is not limited solely to digital libraries such as Valley of the Shadow, nor even to electronic publishing conglomerates such as JSTOR, but is also of increasingly crucial importance to traditional librarians as well.