Submitted by Submitted by Charles B. Faulhaber, HOSC Chair 2010-11, and Director of The Bancroft Library, UCB
HOSC Statement of Purpose and Objectives:
The principal goal of HOSC is to ensure the continued excellence of UC systemwide special collections holdings, striving to avoid unnecessary overlap among collections and to make effective use of limited resources.
To accomplish this, we collaborate and coordinate efforts in acquiring, managing, preserving, and providing access to special collections materials in the UC system.
Our objectives include:
- Collection development: Develop collaborative collection development and collection management strategies, based on collection strengths and programmatic needs of the individual campuses.
- Resource sharing: Develop guidelines and procedures for sharing special collections resources among campuses.
- Access: Coordinate efforts to enhance access to special collections materials.
- Administration: Share information about policies and procedures in day-to-day operations, including areas such as patron registration, reading room service, acquisition of in-kind gifts, confidentiality issues regarding use of certain materials, and fee structures for use and reproduction of materials.
- Preservation: Identify preservation needs and coordinate preservation efforts relating to materials of various formats in special collections.
- Security: Share concerns and information about security issues, including access of staff and patrons to special collections materials, security features in facilities design and maintenance, and rapid communication among UC campuses regarding security alerts.
HOSC 2010-11 Accomplishments:
1. Continue to communicate and work collaboratively with other UC groups such as UCAC, PAG, the DSC, as well as national groups/organizations such as ARL and RBMS on issues of common interest.
Nothing of note to report.
2. Maintain and expand content of the HOSC web site. To encourage possible collaborations and to identify unique holdings, members at each campus are to share information about existing collections and areas of collection strengths by posting a collection highlight list on HOSC’s website.
This objective was discussed extensively during the October meeting. Faulhaber was charged with collecting information about each campus’s holding and put it into a matrix. In the event, only four campuses (UCD, UCLA, UCR, and UCSF) provided such information. Thus this objective remains to be accomplished.
3. Continue to meet regularly (in person or otherwise) to discuss UC-wide Special Collections issues, as addressed in the HOSC Charge and Statement of Purpose, and explore ways to address them.
- Telephone conference calls attended by all members were held 4 October 2010, 7 February 2011, and 9 May 2011. A major discussion topic at the October meeting was the creation of disaster plans. At each meeting recent developments or significant issues at each campus were announced. Other topics included:
- Library budgets (February)
- Policies and procedures for the trade or sale of duplicates. It was decided that because of the great variation in campus practices it would not be worth while to try to establish a system-wide policy (February)
- Campus use of Archivists’ Toolkit (February and May)
- Piracy of digital content: oral histories, sound recordings, art work. Virtually all campuses have encountered sporadic violations and have worked with campus counsel to issue cease-and-desist orders. Most members agreed that the problem was not serious enough to cause us to stop digitizing materials and making them freely available. (May)
4. Model efficient use of resources by close engagement in UC partnerships and collaborations to build and provide ready access to digital special collections.
At the October meeting Adrian Turner (CDL) provided a detailed update of CDL’s plans for Digital Special Collections: (1) the CDL is implementing Google Analytics for tracking of OAC/Calisphere aggregate usage data by summer 2011; the CDL is also exploring the implementation of Google Analytics for use by contributing repositories (to eventually replace AWStats), so that contributors can gain more robust and flexible usage reports on their collections in OAC/Calisphere; (2) Campuses were asked to volunteer for a pilot project to submit MARC records for archival collections directly to Melvyl rather than use automated harvesting of such records in Next-Gen Melvyl; (3) CDL is developing a mechanism to allow campus’s to indicate on the OAC Contributor Dashboard whether they wish to share finding aids with OCLC ArchiveGrid; (4) there is a new widget on the dashboard that will allow campuses to embed the searchbox on local websites and automatically limit the search to local finding aids; (5) CDL requested information for success stories of use of either OAC or Calisphere for marketing purposes; (6) Calisphere now has a local history map mechanism, mapping images as precisely as possible to Google map locations.
At the May meeting a number of CDL-related issues were discussed: (1) use of Archivists’ Tool Kit as more than a processing tool; (2) CDL support for moving data from local hosts to CDL; (3); gauging interest in scanning of print finding aids to create searchable PDFs in lieu of structured finding aids (where the PDFs can be linked from an EAD or MARC collection-level record), and soliciting for information on extent of legacy print (only) inventories in UC special collections and archives; (4) soliciting for endorsement of OCLC’s “Well-Intentioned Practice for Putting Digitized Collections of Unpublished Materials Online; the CDL could potentially endorse, but we would want the backing/support of HOSC and the UC campus libraries.
5. Continue to comment and provide user assessment on development of Next Generation Melvyl and on the efforts of the Next Generation Technical Services New Modes for Access Task Group.
The Next Generation Technical Services Report was submitted to the University Librarians 10 September 2011. They had not had time to review its recommendations by the time of the October meeting. At the February meeting the group noted that the report was generally positive in support of special collections, but that serious technical issues remain to be addressed, chiefly having to do with the efficient creation of finding aids and digitization procedures. A follow-up discussion in May queried HOSC representation on system-wide committees looking at the display of special collections materials.
6. Regularly review SOPAG reports as they pertain to HOSC objectives, and initiate response and take action on relevant issues and activities.
Nothing to report.
[The next chair of HOSC will be Daryl Morrison, Head of Special Collections, at the University of California, Davis].