Building a Digital Repository Program with Limited Resources

Citation

Pancheshnikov, Y. (2012), "Building a Digital Repository Program with Limited Resources", Collection Building, Vol. 31 No. 1, pp. 33-33. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604951211199182

Abby Clobridge, Associate Director of Research and Knowledge Services, Kennedy School Library, Harvard University, has summarized her extensive experience with digital repositories in this comprehensive and practical book. She writes from the perspective of a repository manager at an academic institution; accordingly, the book emphasizes planning, policies, processes, production and models for efficiency. As the author indicates in the preface, the book is intended to serve both as a primer for beginners and as a handbook for librarians who are already fully engaged in the field.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part includes four chapters: Introduction, Strategic Planning, Technical Overview and Staffing. The broad content of these chapters is relevant to any aspect of work with digital repositories. The second part includes seven chapters, each of which focuses on one aspect of digitization: Metadata, Collection Building, Content Recruitment and Marketing, Open Access, Sustainability, Assessment, Web 2 and Digital Repositories. The Introduction and some of the chapters contain an overview of the main definitions and guiding principles related to the discussed aspect of digital repositories. Each chapter includes examples of various supporting materials such as job descriptions, letters, outlines of reports and templates.

The book contains two useful appendices. The first describes an introductory metadada workshop developed for training library technical staff. The second appendix contains an example of an educational digitization project that was included in an introductory history course at Bucknell University.

More references to the literature, and particularly digitization projects, would increase the value of the book and make the text more interesting. This criticism notwithstanding, this book undoubtedly will be useful to a broad audience of library practitioners. Librarians working with digitization projects and senior administrators dealing with the management side of digitization work will find it especially valuable. The book can be recommended to all libraries supporting digitization initiatives.