ARL has published Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 283, a special issue on aligning, integrating, and mainstreaming special collections into broader library operations, guest edited by ARL visiting program officer Lisa Carter of the Ohio State University.
This issue of RLI includes six case studies from ARL member libraries that are incorporating special collections more holistically into library initiatives. The cases were selected by the ARL Working Group on Transforming Special Collections in the Digital Age after issuing a call for proposals in 2012. In an introduction to the issue, Lisa Carter provides an overview of themes that emerged from the case study submissions and she identifies areas for further investigation.
The complete table of contents with links to the articles follows:
- Special at the Core: Aligning, Integrating, and Mainstreaming Special Collections in the Research Library
Lisa R. Carter, Ohio State University - Patron-Driven Acquisitions and the Development of Research Collections: The Case of the Portuguese Canadian History Project
Michael B. Moir, York University - “There’s a Great Future in Plastics”: Mainstreaming a Special Collection
Sean Quimby, Syracuse University - Integrating Special Collections into the Composition Classroom: A Case Study of Collaborative Digital Curriculum
Matthew Vetter and Sara Harrington, Ohio University - The Eaton Collection and UC Riverside Libraries: A Study in Driving Alignment
Ruth M. Jackson, University of California, Riverside - The Confluence of Collections at Johns Hopkins’s Sheridan Libraries
Liz Mengel, Johns Hopkins University - Metastatic Metadata: Transferring Digital Skills and Digital Comfort at UMass Amherst
Robert S. Cox, Danielle Kovacs, Rebecca Reznick-Zellen, Aaron Rubinstein, and Jeremy Smith, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Research Library Issues no. 283 is freely available from ARL Digital Publications.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.