Use Restriction, Workflow Design, and Resource Scarcity Can Limit Discoverability and Access to Digital Collections

[“A book scanner at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco, California” by
Dvortygirl is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0]

One of the primary missions of digital libraries is to improve discoverability of and access to cultural heritage materials through digitization, digital preservation, and cataloging of digital items (Xie and Matusiak, 2016, p. 4). While institutions and users express enthusiasm for digital collections, digital librarians continue to face a number of challenges in their efforts to expand access. Common challenges result from laws and policies that restrict the use of materials, workflow practices that undermine digitization quality and/or efficiency, and insufficient resource allocation for digital preservation and management. Digital librarians navigate these challenges, in part, by following multiple, context-specific best practices.

Digital librarians encounter barriers to accessibility right from the start, at the point of selecting materials for inclusion in digital collections. Copyright laws and institutional policies place restrictions on the use of digitized materials, and these restrictions determine how users can access them. While digital librarians do occasionally violate copyright law without intending to, they also restrict access to materials unnecessarily because the are anxious about infringement (Hirtle, 2011, p. 2, 5). As Peter Hirtle and others have demonstrated, a large percentage of materials under copyright present little risk to GLAMs because they are “orphaned” – meaning the copyright owner is unknown or cannot be contacted (Hirtle, 2011, p. 3, 6-7; Wilkin, 2011, p. 8). In other instances, materials that are actually in the public domain can be erroneously excluded from digital libraries because the custodial institution or copyright holder asserts more rights than they are entitled to (Schlosser, 2009, p. 373-374, 382).

Challenges affecting the accessibility of materials also arise from digitization workflows, which affect the quality of digital materials and the speed at which digitization takes place. For instance, mass digitization projects focus on generating a high volume of digital resources with little quality control (Coyle, 2006, p. 644). The “information factory” workflows characteristic of massive projects like Google Books result in errors like missing pages and obscured text that can affect the accessibility and usefulness of digitized resources (Conway, 2015, p. 58-60; Hoffman, 2016, p. 83-84). Workflows that prioritize quality control are more common in non-mass and large-scale digitization projects like Project Gutenberg and JSTOR, which produce digital texts with far fewer errors and added features that enhance usefulness (Coyle, 2006, p. 642). However, non-mass digitization projects progress much more slowly, meaning that many texts remain inaccessible; Project Gutenberg, for example, has averaged less than 500 digital texts per year over its 37-year history (p. 642).

A similar but distinct tension between quality and quantity is present in workflows for digitizing special collections materials. The Cornell Library Digital Imaging Tutorial, Moving Theory Into Practice (2000-2003), for example, encourages the production of high-quality digital surrogates and so emphasizes the importance of quality control in workflows. Creating a “rich digital master” is important for preservation, but also time and resource intensive. In contrast, Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner argue that we need to “temper our historical emphasis on quality with the recognition that large quantities of digitized special collections materials will better serve our users” (2007, p. 2). As such, they recommend a “tip of the iceberg” approach in which workflows are directed toward rapidly producing usable copies with enough description to make them discoverable through search engines and aggregators (p. 6-7).

The final challenge I want to touch on in this post involves the impact of resource scarcity in GLAMs on digital collections accessibility. Lack of funding to hire trained staff and purchase necessary tech undermines the efficiency of digitization and digital preservation projects and the quality of digital materials in our libraries. Conversion of analog AV collections to digital formats and preservation of born digital records in legacy formats depend on the use of specific and often hard-to-come-by hardware/software (Pennington and Rehberger, 2012, para. 13; Kirschenbaum, Ovenden, and Redwine, 2010, p. 18-20). Without funding to purchase this technology or hire trained staff to use it, we risk permanently losing access to resources in obsolete and legacy formats (Pennington and Rehberger 2012, para. 28-30; Stein, Applegate, and Robbins, 2017, p. 647).

Digital libraries exist to help people discover and use cultural heritage materials. However, even the most robust digitization and digital preservation projects must deal with the ways in which restrictions on use, digitization workflows, and resource scarcity can limit access. Fortunately, digital librarianship as a profession is invested in addressing these challenges with context-specific best practices designed to meet the needs of institutions and communities of users.

Works Cited

Conway, P. (2010). Preservation in the age of Google: Digitization, digital preservation, and dilemmas. Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 80(1), 61-79. https://doi.org/10.1086/648463

Coyle, K. (2006, November 6). Mass digitization of books. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(6), 641-645. https://doi:10.1016/j.acalib.2006.08.002

Erway, R., & Schaffner, J. (2007, October). Shifting gears: Gearing up to get into the flow (Report). OCLC Programs and Research. Retrieved from https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2017/oclcresearch-shifting-gears-second-edition.html

Hirtle, R. (2012). Learning to live with risk. Art Libraries Journal, 37(2), 5-11. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307472200017399

Hoffman, A. L. (2016). Google Books, libraries, and self-respect: Information justice beyond distributions. Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 86(1), 76-92. https://doi.org/10.1086/684141

Kirschenbaum, M. G., Ovenden, R., & Redwine, G. (2010). Digital forensics and born-digital content in cultural heritage collections (Report). CLIR: The Council on Libraries and Information Resources. Retrieved from https://www.clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/pub149.pdf

Pennington, S., & Rehberger D. (2012). The preservation of analog video through digitization. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Institute of Library and Museum Services. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/preservation-of-analog-video-through-digitization/

Schlosser, M. (2009, July). Unless otherwise indicated: A survey of copyright statements on digital library collections. College and Research Libraries, 70(4), 371-385. https://doi.org/10.5860/0700371

Wilkin, J. P. (2011, February). Bibliographic indeterminacy and the scale of problems and opportunities of “rights” in digital collection building (Report). CLIR: The Council on Libraries and Information Resources. Retrieved from https://www.clir.org/pubs/ruminations/wilkin/

Xie, I., & Matusiak, K. (2016). Discover digital libraries: Theory and practice. Cambridge, MA: Elsevier.