Birds of a Feather: Collections Access

The organizations at the table were at various stages of digitizing collections and were all eager to discuss best practice, process, visitor contributions, and more. Questions and topics that emerged were:

• Ongoing challenges of digitizing collections 
• Copyright issues
• Opportunities, Challenges and Risks of Flickr Collections
• Sustainability of online collections platforms
• Crowdsourcing. Should user-generated content be moderated?
• Interpretive Communities (a.k.a. Communities of Passion) and leveraging their enthusiasm
• Scholars and everyday contributors of content: How do they collaborate? What tensions exist?
• Institutional culture-liberal or conservative?
• Verify & clean up data-slowing down digitization or get your data out there and enlist the help of users to clean it up? 
• Keep or delete the old school subjective descriptions found in catalog cards? Is there value in these? 
• Access is only the beginning-how do we facilitate the use of collections in meaningful ways-how do we contextualize online collections and activate them for users?
• Challenges of linking our collections to external resources not controlled by own institutions—issues of trust and authority from institutional point of view vs benefits of linked resources for users
• Either finding or creating a digital forum for gathering resources related to collection access in one place and to continue the conversation