The Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) has announced that OCLC Research has published a new report: Advancing the National Digital Platform: The State of Digitization in US Public and State Libraries.
This report summarises the results of a needs assessment and gap analysis of digitisation activities by public libraries and state library agencies in the US. For the assessment OCLC partnered with the Digital Public Library of America, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, and two divisions of the American Library Association—the Public Library Association and the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services.
The report outlines key findings from the surveys and provides observations and recommendations for future exploration in the area of supporting digitisation efforts in public libraries. According to the report, ninety-two percent of public libraries have locally significant, unique physical collections. More than 37.6% of libraries have engaged in digitisation activities in the last three years. In addition to the common barriers of time and ongoing funding, 61.4% of libraries identified insufficient staff training/expertise as a major barrier to their digitization efforts. All state library agencies reported that digitising and providing online access to local and unique digitised material aligns with their mission either explicitly (12.8%), or broadly (87.2%). Public libraries identified training in imaging best practices (55.6%), copyright risk assessment (47.5%) and metadata best practices (47.0%) as the most potentially helpful to their efforts.
The project was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a National Leadership Grant. With the support of this grant, national surveys of public libraries and state library agencies were conducted to gauge the extent to which US public libraries are positioned to support the growth of the national digital platform (NDP), primarily through the digitization of their unique collections.
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