From a Library of Congress Blog Post by Trevor Owens and Joe Puccio (via The Signal):
For the last five years, in accordance with the Library of Congress Digital Collecting Plan we have been working to make digital collecting a more routine and ongoing area of activity across the agency.
Building on those successes, we are now entering a new phase of maturity for the Library’s digital collections and that work is going to be guided over the next five years by the agency’s new Digital Collections Strategy.
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Anticipated Results
The Strategy is intended to produce the following major results over its five-year life.
- Move toward a digital-forward and e-preferred acquisitions model.
- Support broad, diverse and inclusive collecting.
- Improve service and access for users.
- Modernize IT infrastructure to improve workflows and processes.
- Support digital collections workforce development.
Primary Areas of Focus
The new strategy has four pillars, mirroring the Library of Congress Strategic Plan and Digital Strategy. Its goals are as follows:
- Expand Access. To expand access to collections, the strategy focuses on open content; providing the broadest possible access to rights-restricted content; and simplifying and unifying access and discovery.
- Enhance Services. To enhance user services, the strategy seeks to expand copyright e-deposit; transition to e-preferred, in which digital formats are the preference instead of traditional physical formats, as appropriate across major collecting streams; modernizing documentary collecting to digitally document diverse perspectives on everyday life; and determining a unified approach to support collections use for digital scholarship.
- Optimize Resources. To help modernize operations, the strategy provides a framework to evaluate, reorganize and realign processes and structures to support an increasingly digital collection; train staff to manage a primarily digital acquisition program; and review all digital collections policy and governance groups.
- Measure Impact. To measure the impact of efforts, the strategy calls for user research to best enable access to the collections; establishing data tracking and analysis for collections to inform further collection development; and providing tools and data to staff to support continuous improvement of digital collections activities.
Read the Complete Blog Post
Direct to New LOC Digital Collections Strategy
7 pages; PDF.
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