Jodi Allison-Bunnell
Head of Archives and Special Collections, Senior Archivist, Assistant Professor
Montana State University
Diana Marsh
Assistant Professor of Archives and Digital Curation, College of Information Studies
University of Maryland at College Park
Over the last thirty years, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) have built large-scale networks to make cultural heritage collections more widely searchable and available, including the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and its hubs, (e.g., The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Digital Collection and Mountain West Digital Library), as well as aggregators of cultural heritage collection descriptions (ArchiveGrid, Online Archive of California, Archives West), and other crowd-sourced efforts like Social Networks and Archival Context. All have engaged key challenges of standards, infrastructure, metadata, and of end users and their needs. However, most aggregations have struggled to define their value and to garner financial and organizational sustainability. Most are dependent on federal funders, foundations, and R1 institutions. Final reports from the National Finding Aid Network project, Allison-Bunnell’s research, and the issues behind DPLA’s transition all point to the critical gap in this area. Yet to date, there has been no cross-cutting analysis of these networks, the projects that confronted and overcame these challenges, and the successes and failures that will define the present and future of public knowledge and cultural heritage in the United States. The community can meet this existential moment with a thoughtful and informed reinvention of cultural heritage aggregation. This session will describe a new effort among key practitioners in this space and Ithaka S+R that proposes to find a new way forward for these large-scale networks. As the principals plan the project and seek out expertise on this economic and collective action challenge, they will use the session to engage with the CNI community on economic models, digital libraries, metadata, repositories, and special collections.
