The document discusses the importance of defining and describing collections in libraries. It notes that while digitization efforts have increased access to some materials, only a small percentage of total holdings have been digitized. Creating collection descriptions can help provide context and improve discovery of both digitized and non-digitized materials. Collection descriptions are useful for several purposes, such as increasing visibility of special collections, creating curated topic-based corpora, and aiding in search relevance. They also help in managing collections over time and addressing gaps. The document raises questions about what collections libraries have and whether they have structured descriptions to share.

1. Defining collections and
creating their descriptions
Valentine Charles
A bridge across Europe: linking collections at international
level, Birmingham, October 2014

2. What does The European Library
consider as a collection?
• The collection has items that have been
gathered together in the past or will be
gathered together in the future.
• Membership in a collection is determined by
some criteria of the collector.
• The collection may be treated as an individual
object in itself

4. Digitisation still in progress…
 According to the
ENUMERATE survey 10-
12% of content is digitised
 Only 10% of the 132 million
objects held at the Library of
Congress digitised
 http://www.nytimes.com/200
7/03/10/business/yourmoney
/11archive.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=1&

5. Information access in new
digital services
 Rich information and interesting items are
digitally available but
• are located in different services
• have been developed by many projects and
for different purposes
 Lack of contextual information: poor titles,
lack of other metadata.
 The information is still not connected

6. Challenges for users
 Researchers want to search in large
corpora and find special items.
 But
• Collections relevant for researchers are not
always available in a digital form
• Many collections are not known to research
communities

7. Collection descriptions for
resource access and discovery
 Visibility for non-digitised or even un-catalogued
collections
• Special collections

8.  Provide context for item-level
resources

9.  Create curated corpora based on
specific topics

10.  Use logical and curated information
for improving search (relevance)

11. A tool for resource management
 Representation of provenance
information

12.  Better expression of relations
between item-level and collection
resources

13.  Management of new type of
resources in digital environment:
datasets, virtual exhibitions, users
generated collections…
• Creation of metadata records for collections of
items uncatalogued so far.

14.  Management of the collections
themselves:
• acquisition periodicity
• growth
• subjects gaps
• access Rights

15. Do you have such collections?
Do you have structured descriptions for
them?
Would you like to share them?

16. Thank you
 www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/
 www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/access
Valentine Charles
valentine.charles@kb.nl