Advancing the National Digital Platform: The State of Digitization in US Public and State Libraries

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Highlights:

• Ninety-two percent of public libraries have locally significant, unique physical collections
• More than 37.6% of libraries have engaged in digitization 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 digitizing and providing online access to local and unique digitized 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

Download US Letter .pdf

Download A4 .pdf

Abstract:

Written by Kendra Morgan, Senior Program Manager, WebJunction, and Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC Research Senior Program Officer, this report summarizes the results of a needs assessment and gap analysis of digitization activities by public libraries and state library agencies in the US.

For the assessment OCLC partnered with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA), and two divisions of the American Library Association—the Public Library Association (PLA) and the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS).

The project was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) 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.

The report outlines key findings from the surveys and provides observations and recommendations for future exploration in the area of supporting digitization efforts in public libraries.

Data Supplements

Supplement A: Public and State Library Agency Survey Questions

This PDF document contains the full survey instruments for both public libraries and state library agencies.

Supplement B: Public Libraries Data Supplement

This Excel workbook presents the survey data from public libraries in a digestible fashion. The workbook contains a worksheet for each question, and contains both weighed and unweighted percentages. A full explanation is included on the “Overview” worksheet. The raw survey data for public libraries can be found in Supplement D.

Supplement C: State Library Agencies Data Supplement

This Excel workbook presents the survey data from state library agencies in a digestible fashion. The workbook contains a worksheet for each question. A full explanation is included on the “Overview” worksheet. The raw survey data for state library agencies can be found in Supplement E.

Supplement D: Public Libraries Raw Data

This Excel workbook presents the raw survey data from public libraries in a single worksheet. The names and email addresses of the respondents has been removed.

Supplement E: State Library Agencies Raw Data

This Excel workbook presents the raw survey data from state library agencies in a single worksheet. The names and email addresses of the respondents has been removed.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (grant award, LG-72-15-0197-15).