"What's So Special About Special Collections?" Or, Assessing the Value Special Collections Bring to Academic Libraries (original) (raw)
Over the past decade, special collections and archives have become an increasingly important focus of academic and research libraries thanks to the pioneering ―Exploring Hidden Collections‖ survey conducted by Judith Panitch in 1998 and the subsequent formation of ARL‘s Special Collections Working Group. Special collections have responded by undertaking large-scale projects to process backlogs, digitize materials for scholarly access and enjoyment, and conduct more instructional outreach for students. Nevertheless, in the current climate in which ARL libraries are examining their value and impact with an eye toward defining their return on investment, special collections and archives are not well-prepared to define the value they contribute because they lack standardized performance measures and usage metrics. In this paper, we propose strategies for overcoming this impasse by shifting from collection-centric to user-centric approaches to defining metrics for special collections and archives, and by identifying appropriately precise measures that can be consistently and widely applied to facilitate cross-institutional comparisons. We explore, for example, the potential benefits of employing a ―reader-hour‖ in place of the commonly used ―reader-day‖ metric, and correlating it with item usage data in order to gauge the intensity of special collections reading room use. We also discuss attempts to assess the impact of instructional outreach through measures of student confidence in pursuing research projects that involve original documents as primary sources. Defining suitable metrics will enable special collections and archives to better assess and articulate their value propositions in the context of the rapidly evolving landscape of research libraries. For slides used during our conference presentation, see: http://independent.academia.edu/ChristianDupont/Talks/37213/\_Whats\_So\_Special\_About\_Special\_Collections\_Or\_Assessing\_the\_Value\_Special\_Collections\_Bring\_to\_Academic\_Libraries
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