2003-2004 Progress Report: Collection Building Strategies

See the complete progress report submitted to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation: [PDF]

At the third all-partners’ project meeting held on October 24, 2004, the group agreed to commission investigations into five key areas: American literature, American music, American maps, American art and architecture, and natural history.

Thematic gaps in the American West collection will be filled with collection content contributed by the broader range of Aquifer and Digital Library Federation (DLF) research libraries.

American Literature and American Music

This area will be taken forward by the DLF’s Aquifer initiative, which is focusing its collection building efforts on enriching and extending the collection development efforts of the American South (a partnership led by Emory University) and the American West.

• American literature: Because the boundaries around the corpus are likely to be blurred in so many areas, American literature will be tackled as a single collection undifferentiated by regional considerations. The collection will be developed incrementally beginning with out-of-copyright materials (1776-1921).
• American music: The American West project has defined a collection development path that begins with a detailed survey which will be conducted by an expert in the history of American music who will look broadly across publicly accessible online collections of scores, sheet music, and audio files. The consultant will also provide an overview of available holdings, a sense of their depth and breadth, and offer recommendations about efficient collection development strategies.

American Maps

Working with map bibliographers, the project partners will explore the many excellent online digital library collections to determine how best to assemble a collection of digitally reformatted maps bearing on the American West.

American Art and Architecture

The project partners will undertake a similar survey of the growing number of library, museum, and other sites that make digital surrogates of art and architectural work available online.

Natural History

While the American West project can comfortably develop strategies for building collections of maps, art, and architecture of the American West, we will engage colleagues in the natural history museum community to see whether such a strategy might be developed there.