Exploiting Synergies

摘要

There was a time, just a few short years ago, when the Library of Congress and a couple of other leading research libraries were the principal developers of high-quality digital collections. Not now. Today, enterprising academic organizations, museums, and think tanks can take advantage of powerful open source development tools and get started digitizing, albeit on a smaller scale. Activity has grown, but one thing remains constant: Historical collections can still benefit from a big burst of "Web Wow!" when they appear online-at least among the scholars and experts who need them. Digital collections gain vast new readerships when they appear online in structured and searchable formats. The fact that the excitement factor remains high spells opportunity for the profession. At the same time, the explosion of social networking software such as blogs, wikis, and community sites (think MySpace, Facebook, or Bebo) now enables repository managers to merge static repositories with Web 2.0 applications. When the static web meets the "social" web, new synergies emerge. Repositories can now go interactive, and they're earning a place in the Web 2.0 universe.