n. (also digital collections)an aggregation of archival resources that involves or makes use of computer devices, data, or media to manage, store, or share these resourcesWatson and Graham 1998, 134Participants in the CSS Alabama Digital Collection project believe that its greatest success lies in using this unique Web capability to create a highly interactive and flexible educational experience. By offering a variety of materials in digitized form, it accommodates diverse learning styles.Smith 2001, 12These new digital collections are somewhat analogous to published anthologies of primary sources, carefully selected by an individual or an editorial team to serve heuristic purposes or to provide supporting evidence for an interpretation.Laise 2007The Heritage Health Index documents the condition of digital collections at all institutions that hold them. It was particularly important to include digital materials in a comprehensive survey about U.S. collections since they are increasingly becoming larger portions of collecting institutions’ holdings and introduce new and unique preservation challenges.NISO and IMLS 2007, 4A digital collection consists of digital objects that are selected and organized to facilitate their discovery, access, and use. Objects, metadata, and the user interface together create the user experience of a collection.Zick 2009, 689The initial efforts of building digital collections were fueled by the widespread and rapid growth of the Internet. The sharing of digital information in the form of computer text files rapidly extended to images, documents, and other media ... Easily accessible and relatively affordable software tools to support Web sites were widely used, and the first wave of local collection Web sites sprouted up in many libraries. Typically, these collections were comprised a set of scanned photos posted within a locally designed Web homepage and various navigation designs.Miller 2011, 3A collection of digital resources made available online. Resources may be born digital or be digitized versions of analog/physical resources. Availability may be restricted or unrestricted. The terms digital library, digital repository, and digital archive are sometimes used synonymously with digital collection.Bromley, Christman, and Page 2015, 34Our digital collections include both digitized materials, such as county and city records that have been scanned and ingested into the system, and born-digital materials, such as state publications that are electronically deposited by state agencies.Dressler and Kristof 2018, 979One respondent made a distinguishment by publication status, stating that they will not remove any previously published material (but would, on the other hand, consider a request for an item not previously published). This reflection points to a unique characteristic of digital collections: they frequently contain a blend of published and unpublished content.Shepard 2020, 47During the last two decades, archivists have developed digital collections and in-house consultation services for K–12 teachers and higher education faculty. Digitizing collections to offer better access to materials for all patrons began in earnest in 1990s. Some archives, museums, and libraries have worked to develop curated digital collections especially designed for K–12 education, including prepared lesson plans and exercises.
Joyce et al. 2022, 105Technological advances over the last two decades have driven and enabled an explosion of digital collections work within libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs). The total output and impact of this work is impossible to quantify, but it includes websites that facilitate access to and discovery of collections; consortia and platforms for aggregating and sharing digital objects and their metadata; internal databases and collection management systems used to manage intellectual and physical control of materials; digital preservation systems and tools; and born-digital processing systems and workflows.McPhee, Maches, and Christensen 2025, 58–59Over the last fifteen years, the UC San Diego Library has digitized primary source materials and ingested born-digital content into our local Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), building high-quality, accessible online collections. The DAMS content is freely available on the library’s Digital Collections website, a public search and discovery interface that currently features over 400,000 digital objects. Content from the site is regularly harvested and made discoverable on other platforms, including Calisphere (a California Digital Library product) and the Digital Public Library of America. Digital content includes images, text, audiovisual recordings, and data. For researchers and our community, online access to University Archives collections improves discovery and creates potential for new analysis and use of the materials.
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The term digital collection carries a variety of different connotations, often being used synonymously with terms such as digital library, digital repository, or digital archives. Especially when plural, as in digital collections, the term refers to aggregations of either digitized or born-digital archival resources, restricted or unrestricted, that mirror the structure of an archives’ physical collections or are artificially grouped.
