Building sustainable digital collections – a visual resources collection perspective

Extract

One enormous problem confronting visual resources (VR) collections internationally is the time, labor and expense of converting or creating digital collections while maintaining and even adding to the analog collection. It will take considerable time to reach the critical digital mass that will begin to reflect the richness already available in our analog collections. The analog collections must be maintained in tandem with the digital development. As one might logically conclude, this is twice the work. It is improbable that any of us will see our staffs doubling. This underscores the need to define clear goals for digital collection development that are reasonable given the level of staffing and the need for continuation of analog services for the foreseeable future. This conundrum may have an up side in that it will tend to encourage resource sharing and consortial development of digital resources.