Conference Paper
“What’s
So Special about Special Collections?” Or, Assessing the Value Special
Collections Bring to Academic Libraries
Christian
Dupont
Aeon
Program Director
Atlas
Systems
Virginia
Beach, Virginia, United States of America
Email:
cdupont@atlas-sys.com
Elizabeth Yakel
Professor
School of Information,
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United
States of America
Email: yakel@umich.edu
2013 DuPont and Yakel.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 2.5 Canada (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ca/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.
Abstract
Objective – The objective of this study was to examine and
call attention to the current deficiency in standardized
performance measures and usage metrics
suited to assessing the value and impact of special collections and archives
and their contributions to the mission of academic research libraries and to
suggest possible approaches to overcoming the deficiency.
Methods
– The authors reviewed attempts over the
past dozen years by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the
Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to highlight the unique
types of value that special collections and archival resources contribute to
academic research libraries. They also examined the results of a large survey
of special collections and archives conducted by OCLC Research in 2010. In
addition, they investigated efforts by the Society of American Archivists (SAA)
dating back to the 1940s to define standardized metrics for gathering and
comparing data about archival operations. Finding that the library and archival
communities have thus far failed to develop and adopt common metrics and
methods for gathering data about the activities of special collections and
archives, the authors explored the potential benefits of borrowing concepts for
developing user-centered value propositions and metrics from the business
community.
Results
– This
study found that there has been a lack of consensus and precision concerning
the definition of “special collections” and the value propositions they offer,
and that most attempts have been limited in their usefulness because they were
collections-centric. The study likewise reaffirmed a lack of consensus
regarding how to define and measure basic operations performed by special
collections and archives, such as circulating materials to users in supervised
reading rooms. The review of concepts and metrics for assessing value in the
business community, however, suggested new approaches to defining metrics that
may be more successful.
Conclusion
–
The authors recommend shifting from collection-centric to user-centric
approaches and identifying appropriately precise metrics that can be consistently
and widely applied to facilitate cross-institutional comparisons. Adopting a
user-centric perspective, they argue, will provide a broader picture of how
scholars interact with special collections at different points in the research
process, both inside and outside of supervised reading rooms, as well as how
undergraduate students change their thinking about evidence through interaction
with primary sources. They authors outline the potential benefits of
substituting the commonly used “reader-day” metric for tabulating reading room
visits with a “reader-hour” metric and correlating it with item usage data in
order to gauge the intensity of reading room use. They also discuss the
potential benefits of assessing impact of instructional outreach in special
collections and archives through measures of student confidence in pursuing
research projects that involve primary sources.
Introduction
What’s so special
about special collections? What kinds of value do they contribute to the
overall mission of academic libraries and their parent institutions in terms of
support for research, teaching, and learning? How should we measure return on
the immense investment that it takes to maintain their secure,
climate-controlled facilities, provide salaries and wages for staff, and
support the various costs associated with acquiring, processing, and preserving
rare and unique materials? How should we measure value and assess impact?
“What’s So Special
about Special Collections?” was the title chosen for the inaugural issue of the
Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) journal RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts
and Cultural Heritage, which appeared in spring 2000. Although the most
frequent answer to the question in that issue was the collections themselves
(Boyd, 2000; de Hamel, 2000), some articles also pointed to the distinctive
qualities of special collections researchers (Howarth,
2000) and staff and their interactions (Katchen,
2000). The same title was also used for a special section of an issue of American Libraries (2000) that
highlighted several collections as well as collaborative collecting projects.
In June 2001, the
Association of Research Libraries (ARL) held a working symposium on the future
of special collections in research libraries at Brown University (Association
of Research Libraries, 2001; Hewitt & Panitch,
2003). This led to the creation of an ARL task force charged with engaging the
agenda that emerged from the symposium. Following the task force’s final report
(Association of Research Libraries, 2006), a new ARL special collections
working group was assembled and given a charge that included “contributing to
the work underway within ARL to develop qualitative and quantitative measures
for the evaluation of special collections” (Association of Research Libraries,
2010b). In October 2009, ARL partnered with the Coalition for Networked
Information (CNI) to host a two-day forum on special collections, “An Age of
Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age,” which opened with a
panel session titled “Why Are Special Collections so Important? Exploring the
Value Proposition of Special Collections” (Association of Research Libraries,
2009a). Participants at the forum focused on expanding the research potential
and value of special collections through the creation of virtual collections of
digitized materials. Nichols (2009) explored various aspects of this issue,
taking up both the utilitarian argument that special collections do not deserve
support unless they are widely used, as well as the scholarly perspective that
digitization represents a natural evolution which promises to keep the
collections alive through new (if not yet fully discovered) transformative
uses.
In January 2010, ARL
announced that it was collaborating in a three-year IMLS grant-funded study
titled “Value, Outcomes, and Return on Investment of Academic Libraries
(Lib-Value),” the aim of which is to “enrich, expand, test, and implement
methodologies measuring the return on investment (ROI) in academic libraries”
(Association of Research Libraries, 2010a). Whether or how this study
will address special collections is not yet known, but it seems worthwhile to
suggest some possible areas of engagement, especially because library
discourse around value propositions appears to have reached a critical
juncture.
Value Propositions for Special Collections
Defining
customer-oriented value propositions emerged as a business strategy in the
early 2000s. In business parlance, a “value
proposition is an analysis and quantified review of the benefits,
costs, and value that an organization can deliver to customers and other
constituent groups within and outside of the organization” (Value Proposition,
2012; Barnes, Blake, & Pinder 2009, p. 28). As we
have noted, value propositions for special collections – although they have not
often been labeled as such – typically have been framed around inherent
features of the collections themselves or their use by scholars. Summarizing
these viewpoints, Waters (2009) stated at the ARL-CNI symposium:
At its most simplistic,
the value proposition for special collections is that scholarship broadly
across fields in the humanities, social sciences, and the sciences just cannot
proceed without corollary investment in the acquisitions and carrying costs of
the primary source evidence needed to sustain and advance those scholarly
fields. (Waters, 2009, p. 32)
Others, meanwhile,
have attempted to articulate the value of special collections in terms of their
impact upon a wide range of functions and indicators. These include not only
contributions to research and the creation of new knowledge, but also their
usefulness for teaching and learning (particularly through the development of
critical thinking skills), and even the enhancement of an institution’s
reputation and prestige – the latter being a function highlighted by Koda (2008) but implicitly critiqued by Waters (2009).
Measuring and Assessing Value
Although the special
collections and archives communities by and large have not attempted to
articulate explicit value propositions, they have engaged in various efforts to
define collection and usage metrics.
The metrics movement
in the archival community dates back to the 1960s, when the Society of American
Archivists established a Committee on Uniform Archival Statistics. Its
functions were:
To collect and analyze
information about existing archival statistical systems with a view towards (a)
isolating and describing these aspects of archival activity which are
measurable, i.e., can be expresses in numerical terms; (b) defining these
characteristics with a precision that will eliminate confusion wherever a
particular term is used; (c) developing standards for archival statistics that
will permit meaningful comparisons and studies of archival institutions
throughout the country; and (d) encouraging general adoption of these standards
by archival agencies. (Campbell, 1967)
Unfortunately, no
statistical standards for measuring processing activities or usage emerged from
this early effort or other subsequent attempts within the archival community,
with the possible exception of the Archival Metrics Project (n.d.), whose user-based evaluation tools for evaluating the
quality of archival services and facilities are beginning to see some adoption
(Duff et al., 2010). Meanwhile, the topic has been emerging in the special
collections community, as evidenced, for example, by sessions held at recent
ACRL Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) preconferences,
for example, the presentations given at the 2009 RBMS preconference seminar on
“Public Services and ‘Un-Hidden’ Collections” (Schreyer, Schaffner,
Bowen, & Steele, 2009).
A pressing need for
special collections and archival metrics therefore remains, as witnessed by the
report that OCLC Research has published concerning its 2010 survey of special
collections and archives in 275 academic and research libraries throughout the
United States and Canada. The most comprehensive and detailed investigation of
its kind to date, the study builds upon the “Exposing Hidden Collections”
survey conducted by Panitch (2001) in 1998. Report
authors Dooley and Luce remark that their findings “convey how difficult it is to
evaluate data usefully without standard metrics in use across the special
collections community. We cannot demonstrate the level of value delivered to
primary constituencies, unless we can reliably characterize our users” (2010,
p. 35) – and,
we would add, their use.
While recurrent
interest in both metrics and values has been expressed in the special
collections and archival communities for some time, little traction thus far
has been gained by efforts to define and operationalize the momentum.
A Stalemate
We are thus faced with
a stalemate. On the one hand, academic libraries have been focusing renewed
attention on special collections over the past decade based on an assumption
that rare and uniquely held materials will serve to distinguish research
libraries as they rapidly move into a future in which their core collections
and services will be constituted by a commonly held array of licensed content
and other distributed electronic resources. On the other hand, special
collections have done little either to articulate their distinctive value or
identify metrics that demonstrate how they have been contributing to the
mission of their parent institutions and the larger academic enterprise they
serve. At the same time, the uniqueness of special collections vis-à-vis main
library collections has been disputed (Lavoie, Connaway,
& Dempsey, 2005). And yet, turning the uniqueness argument on its head,
Waters (2009) – like Nichols (2009) – has argued that the value proposition for
special collections is enhanced through digitization and the resultant
opportunities to perform cross-collection analyses and comparisons.
Despite these
disconnects, special collections have been producing relevant value on an
increasing scale. In addition to pursuing a range of digitization activities,
special collections librarians and archivists have also been working diligently
to bring primary resources into the classroom to support teaching and learning.
The 2010 ARL SPEC Kit survey on “Special Collections Engagement” documents the
greater levels of effort that special collections have been putting into
instructional outreach, exhibits, and public programs in recent years.
Nevertheless, the otherwise encouraging report admits that “institutions feel
they are not able to quantify the success of their efforts, and this in turn
limits the ability to compare activities within the institution or across
institutions, to plan further outreach effectively, or to communicate the
results of those outreach activities to the larger special collections
community” (Berenbak et al., 2010, pp. 16-17).
It seems evident that
the inability of institutions to quantify their successes, let alone describe
them qualitatively, stems from a lack of standardized metrics for measuring
special collections usage and or even commonly agreed-upon values. Following
are some perspectives and practical proposals that we hope will prove helpful
in surmounting the current impasse.
Approaching Definitions
One problem that
immediately arises in trying to identify either the value proposition or
appropriate metrics for special collections is defining just what one means by
“special collections.” This is typically done with reference to the collections
themselves, and includes a list of materials formats and qualifiers concerning
rarity and uniqueness and sometimes age and physical vulnerability. For
instance, the 2003 ARL statement of principles Research Libraries and the Commitment to Special Collections takes this approach. According to this statement, special
collections
comprise manuscripts and
archival collections unduplicated elsewhere and one-of-a-kind or rarely held
books. They also include items precious through their rarity, monetary value,
or their association with important figures or institutions in history,
culture, politics, sciences, or the arts.
Special collections
extend beyond paper to other formats of cultural significance, for example
photographs, moving pictures, architectural drawings, and digital archives.
Special collections are also significant for their focused assemblages of
published materials so comprehensive as to constitute unparalleled
opportunities for scholarship. (Association of Research
Libraries, 2003, n.p.)
The 2009 report on
Special Collections in ARL Libraries pursued a decidedly different definitional
course and identified special collections as “any kind of vehicle for
information and communication that lacks readily available and standardized
classification schemes, and any that is vulnerable to destruction or
disappearance without special treatment” (Association of Research Libraries,
Working Group on Special Collections, 2009).
These approaches
reflect and perpetuate varying degrees of ambiguity. They both also reflect a
collections-centric approach. Might it be possible and perhaps more useful to
take a user-centric approach, especially when it comes to defining value? Doing
so would likely lead us to a different set of metrics and different algorithms
for assessing quantitatively and qualitatively the values derived from special
collections. By adopting a user-centric perspective, we may be able to look
more broadly at how scholars interact with special collections at different
points in the research process, both inside and outside of supervised reading
rooms, as well as how undergraduate students change their thinking about
evidence through interaction with primary sources.
Values and metrics
converge and diverge in various ways across the spectrum of library services. While
collections that are used in a controlled reading room or staff-mediated
situation are typically described as “non-circulating,” this is an imprecise
and unhelpful term when it comes to defining metrics. It is, in fact, perfectly
appropriate to refer to the process of requesting, consulting, and returning
special collections materials in a reading room environment as “circulation”
for the metaphor and processes it represents are essentially the same as those
employed for the circulation of materials from open stacks in the main library.
The only substantial difference is that the user is not allowed to remove the
materials from a defined location. Likewise, just as raw circulation counts can
serve as a basic indicator of the frequency of the use of main library
collections, so, too, they can provide a similar index of special collections
usage. Thus, a well-defined circulation metric for special collections and
archives could also contribute toward a goal of integrating them more fully
into the operational perspectives of their parent institutions (Whittaker,
2008).
Taking another tack,
speedier circulation in special collections could help researchers work more
efficiently and perhaps also more effectively by reducing lag times between
requesting and receiving materials and the associated disruptions to study and
concentration. Accordingly, retrieval time could constitute a benchmark metric
for special collections library service that could be correlated with increased
scholarly productivity – an important component of the special collections
value proposition, as we have seen above. In fact, the National Archives
(United Kingdom) closely monitors retrieval times using its internal electronic
paging system to meet its goal of fulfilling all requests within twenty minutes
or less (D. Priest, personal communication, December 8, 2010).
Yet these types of
linkages between circulation metrics and end-user values are not currently
possible beyond the confines of individual institutions because there is no
generally accepted definition for counting many of the types of materials that
are found in special collections. Although it is not difficult in principle to
apply common standards for counting the use of published print materials, such
as books and serials, where a count of circulated volume units is the
established norm (Association of Research Libraries, 2009b; International
Organization for Standardization, 2008), there is no standard or best practice
for tabulating the usage of collections of unpublished manuscripts and
archives. Special collections repositories that include university archives or
otherwise function as archives tend to count circulation use at the box or
container level. By contrast, special collections whose strengths lie in
historical and literary manuscripts tend to count circulation use at the folder
or even individual item level. Some special collections that include both
manuscript and archival collections apply a multiplier to circulation counts of
archival boxes – thus, a single box may be tallied as representing 250-500
items if it is a 5-inch wide document case or even a thousand items if it is a
full-size record storage container. Such extreme variations in practice tend to
render circulation figures for special collections rather meaningless, even for
the special collections librarians who collect them.
Another factor that
complicates and skews circulation counts for special collections is the concept
of a visit. ARL statistics follow the definition and methodology prescribed by
the NISO Z39.7 standard for calculating visits, which is an averaged gate count
over a typical week (National Information Standards Organization, n.d.). Special collections libraries and archives, on the
other hand, typically require their users to complete a registration form and
present some type of identity document as a general security precaution before
admitting them to the reading room. The registration record, or another system,
such as a daily sign-in sheet, is also often used to track the date and time of
the user’s visits and occasionally the materials consulted during each visit.
Special collections
libraries that track the materials consulted during each visit generally
tabulate the use of the same item on different days as distinct circulation counts,
whereas other repositories count only the first time the item is requested,
especially if they base their count on the number of callslips
submitted rather than the number of times the item is actually delivered to the
researcher in the reading room. Obviously, this divergence in practice results
in statistical counts that cannot be used for cross-institutional comparisons.
To compensate for this
lack of consistency, some institutions employ a “reader-day” metric that
considers simply the total number of visits per month or per year. This type of
broad metric has its shortcomings as well. For instance, a visit by a local
user who requests one volume and looks at it for ten minutes is given equal
weight to a visit by a professional scholar who has traveled from across the
ocean to look at a cartful of material and who spends every moment the reading
room is open doing so. Likewise, the metric itself does not readily tell us how
many unique visitors have used the reading room or how many days on average the
typical user has stayed.
Taking Flight
To overcome this last defect, it would be enough to
apply a more precise measure. Looking at the basic metrics other industries
have developed to measure their business performance can be instructive. For
example, two basic metrics that the airline industry uses to measure overall
business capacity and volume are “available seat-miles” (ASMs), which is equal
to the number of available seats multiplied by the number of miles flown, and
“revenue passenger-miles” (RPMs), which equals the number of filled seats
multiplied by the number of miles flown. Dividing RPM by ASM yields a third
metric, “load factor,” which represents the percentage of airline seating
capacity that is actually used (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Global
Airline Industry Program, n.d.).
Because these metrics are simple in concept and can be equally and objectively
applied across all airline companies, they are useful for assessing the
performance of individual airlines from quarter to quarter, comparing the
respective performance of multiple airlines over a single quarter, and
benchmarking the overall performance of the industry over time.
Although special
collections reading rooms are seldom arranged or oriented to calculating
seating availability or measuring their performance as a quotient of seats
filled, it may be useful to consider adopting a measurement strategy akin to
revenue passenger-miles in order to enable libraries to engage in meaningful
longitudinal and comparative assessments. As shown above, the reader-day metric
fails to adequately convey the amount of time that researchers actually spend
in the reading room. It also does not take into account differences in reading
room schedule. If a reading room is open for four hours on a Saturday afternoon
should that be considered equivalent to a weekday when the reading room is open
for six or eight or ten hours? Most special collections that employ a
reader-day metric do in fact treat all of these as equivalent, which is to say
that they consider a “day” to be any day when they maintain at least some
reading room hours.
Taking a lesson from
the airlines, these shortcomings could be remedied by simply refining the basic
reader-day metric to instead count reader-hours. Just as airlines use
seat-miles rather than, say, seat-segments to gauge capacity and profitability,
so, too, special collections libraries could achieve a more precise,
consistent, and objective measure of their use by counting the actual hours
that researchers spend in the reading room.
And it would not be
hard to do. To facilitate the tabulation and calculation, the manual tally
sheets and reading room logs that most special collections employ to track
usage could be replaced with simple electronic databases that staff would use
to record the time that researchers enter and leave the reading room. If the
log also linked visits with individual researchers, reports could be
constructed to calculate the number of unique visitors during a given time
period and analyses of the average visit lengths of various categories of users
(such as students, faculty members, visiting scholars, and members of the
general public). Visitors could even be given “smart” cards to scan upon entry
and exit, like those the National Archives and Records Administration has begun
issuing at some of its research facilities.
Furthermore,
reader-hour data could be correlated with circulation or item usage data to
provide a kind of “load factor” indicator of reading room use. How many items,
on average, do various categories of researchers consult when they visit the
reading room? To facilitate basic comparisons, it would be enough to divide the
total number of items used during a given time period by the total number of
reader-hours.
Having precise metrics
and consistent data collection methods would enable managers to assess the
adequacy of their services and staffing over time. Are special collections
reading rooms in fact getting busier as evidence from some libraries, largely
anecdotal, would suggest? Have changes in policy, such as allowing researchers
to use personal digital cameras in the reading room, had an effect on the way
researchers are using their time in the reading room? Are researchers spending
less time in reading rooms because they can now come in and make their own
digital copies at no charge and then consult these copies at home on their own
time? Or is the opposite occurring: because it is now quicker and easier to
obtain copies, are more researchers spending more time in the reading room and
requesting more materials?
The impact of such
changes in policy and practice on researchers and staff alike is potentially
significant and therefore should be assessed. How else will libraries be able
to make informed decisions about service delivery and staffing unless they have
reliable measures and data to guide them? Yet such assessments are not
currently possible because special collections have yet to define and employ
adequate metrics and data collection methods. In an unpublished study, Yakel and Goldman (2002) found that although all
repositories have at least some mechanisms for data collection and there are
some commonalities in the kinds of statistics collected, there are fundamental
differences in the reasons why archives and special collections amass data, how
they collect it, and what they do with it. These differences have persisted for
a long time and have previously prevented standardization and circumscribed
what can be done with this information. The interview data from the study also
revealed the limitations of current data collection methods.
In terms of value, a
corollary concept that could extend the application of reader-hours and load
factor metrics is “intensity of use,” an idea introduced by Miller. In his
study, Miller (1986) proposed four levels of intensity: incidental use,
substantive use, important use, and fundamental use. Miller based his analysis
on seven data elements pertaining to characteristics of the resource consulted
and the nature of the citation. Goggin (1986)
similarly attempted to demonstrate the value of collection through usage by
examining callslips and citations to materials from
the Library of Congress. These early attempts to understand the impact of
special collections on scholarship have not been followed up in more recent
years even though methods of citation analysis and visualizations of scholarly
networks have become more sophisticated.
The interplay between
metrics and values can also be demonstrated by looking at how archives and special
collections support the teaching mission of the university. Special collections
generally collect data on the number of instructional sessions presented to
visiting classes and the numbers of local students who use the reading room.
Nevertheless, as the ARL SPEC Kit survey on “Special Collections Engagement”
cited above has shown, repositories have struggled to assess the impact of
special collections on learning outcomes (Berenbak et
al., 2010).
The impact is
potentially large. In the final beta testing of the Archival Metrics Project (n.d.) “Student Researcher Questionnaire” in 11 classes at
two universities, we found that 92% (n=444) of the students enrolled in these
courses had never used archives or special collections before. Ninety-six
percent said that they would return if they had another project that would
benefit from the use of primary sources (Daniels & Yakel,
in press). Although one of the primary arguments levied against special
collections has been that their collections are esoteric and outreach
insignificant, these findings indicate that much value can be gained from
having undergraduates engage with special collections.
The Archival Metrics
project along with other studies by Duff and Cherry (2008) and Krause (2010)
provide further options for demonstrating the impact of special collections and
archives on student learning. Duff and Cherry measured the effect of archival
orientation programs on student confidence in undertaking archival research.
The Archival Metrics “Student Researcher Questionnaire” was similarly designed
to measure confidence and also asks whether skills learned as a part of
archival assignments are transferrable to other courses. Krause (2010)
conducted a large-scale field experiment to gauge the effect of archival instruction.
Her results showed that such instruction helps students develop their critical
thinking about evidence. A wider diffusion of these and other evaluation and
impact measures are needed to more fully understand the value of special
collections to higher education.
Discussion
Special collections
and archives can and do contribute unique value to research and learning, but
their value has not been effectively communicated due to a lack of standards
and best practices for measuring and assessing their impact. Although past
efforts to define and operationalize special collections and archival metrics
have not met with much success, the current focus of research libraries on
value propositions and return on investment provides a new opportunity to remedy
the deficiency. As we have shown with our proposal for a reader-hour metric,
some solutions may only require identifying appropriately precise variations of
existing measures that can be applied objectively and universally. In other
cases, the solution may simply involve making wider use of available tools,
such as the Archival Metrics user surveys.
The key in every case
is to define metrics and assessment techniques that are user-centric, that is,
defined around user perceptions and demonstrations of impact on the user. In
1997, Saracevic and Kantor introduced the idea of a
user-centered approach concentrating on the impact of library service, which
they called “value as results” or “value in use” (p. 540). In The Value of Academic Libraries, Oakleaf expands on this concept and argues
for the importance of demonstrating value-on-investment measures that show
impact or the differences that libraries make in the lives of their users
(2010). Creating an identifiable link between the value proposition and demonstrated
value for the user also needs to be done for special collections and
archives. Quantitative approaches that measure intensity of use offer one
possibility, while qualitative interview and sampling techniques offer another.
Chapman and Yakel have observed that although neither
value nor impact “can be determined solely by quantitative means, operational
metrics can be structured to better support research into value propositions
and impact” (2012, p. 149). They have likewise elaborated a rationale for
making better use of operational data collected by special collections and
archives reading rooms by highlighting several successful case studies.
Nevertheless, they have also recognized, like Dooley and Luce (2010), that
“[t]he absence of data definitions makes it difficult for repositories to model
and collect data in a coherent and consistent way over time” (p. 150). To
address this deficiency and the need to formulate more appropriate usage
metrics for special collections, RBMS formed a Metrics and Assessment Task
Force in July 2011 and charged it with “examining current practices for
gathering and reporting information to demonstrate the value and impact of
special collections and archives” (Association of College and Research
Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, 2011). The task force will
provide a report and initial set of recommendations to the RBMS Executive
Committee by June 2013, including the identification of specific guidelines and
best practices that should be developed to support meaningful assessment
activities. In the meantime, Dupont (2012) has served
as guest editor of special issue of RBM:
A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage devoted to
assessment in special collections and archives. The goal of defining usage
metrics for special collections and archives at academic institutions is
ultimately to better assess and articulate their value propositions in the
context of the rapidly evolving landscape of research libraries.
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