Late in August OCLC held a special event called ‘Digitization matters: breaking through the barriers, scaling up digitization of special collections‘ in Chicago. The audio of the event is now available on the OCLC site and is important listening for museums trying to come to terms with mass digitisation and the new access demands of digital users/customers.
Amongst a slew of excellent well thought out short talks, Michael Jenkins from the Met reads Susan Chun’s provocative paper in her absence. It is a great way to start things off. Susan emphasises the importance of keeping pace with users and their expectations, and not just scholarly users. As she points out, users will neither wait for us nor will they necessarily need to wait for us as in the digital realm borders are extremely porous. She argues that audiences require quantity over exacting quality and that this is now what really matters. This requires new organisational structures, internal capacity building and looking beyond project-based funding models. She uses several important examples from her time at the Met especially the Artstor/scholars license project and the lessons learned from it.
Download the lot to your media player.
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