Digital Strategies

The Library of Congress has recently completed a National Research Council review of its technology status that has been published as LC21: A Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress. Issues raised in this report have direct relation to museums: will we collect digital objects? how will we integrate those collections with traditional museum materials (either as originals or surrogates or both)? how can things as impermament as websites be saved? More of the issues have indirect impact: the need to consider preservation, understanding guidelines for digital quality, managing digital content. Using the LC21 report as a springboard, this paper will look at the current sense of what constitutes a workable digital strategy, those areas where standards and descriptions of best practices are or are not developing, a sense of where museums as experts in management of information can add to the discussions and where they can learn from the experience of others. The goal of the paper is to come to a clearer understanding of where we are and where we are going, not only from the perspective of individual museums and their projects but from the perspective of our discipline as a whole.