I quickly became aware that two digitization projects were being
spearheaded by two tenured faculty librarians as candidates for our
initial digital collection: one somewhat aggressively as a grant project
and the other more casually without the impetus of a grant. Being
naïve with regard to the politics of the organization, I deferred to
others who decided to give precedence to the grant-funded project.
The CONTENTdm committee subsequently decided that the Library
needed a process for evaluating and prioritizing potential digital
collections. Perhaps this was a response to the way in which resources
had been committed to the first project because of a schedule driven
by external funding. Or perhaps it was the usual librarian caution that
any new undertaking will grow to unmanageable proportions if fed too
liberally. Perhaps the desire for oversight was motivated by
recognition that the shape of our accumulated digital collections over
time would define the character of the Library to a significant degree,
and whether this was ad hoc or directed was not a matter of chance
but of choice. Whatever the reason, a digitization selection
subcommittee to the collection management committee was proposed
by a tenured library faculty member at the first CONTENTdm
committee meeting I attended.