Selection for Digital Conversion in Academic Libraries

Abstract

Electronic technology has begun to change the way scholars conduct their research. Before this new approach to scholarly inquiry becomes a viable and productive method in institutions of higher learning, the existing resources that a scholar normally would use in the library must be converted to a digital format in order to be accessible electronically. How do academic libraries set about creating a body of knowledge and begin to convert traditional print collections to a digital format in order to satisfy what today’s researchers want? This article examines previous methods of selection and collection building, and applies those supporting principles to today’s collection-building efforts for digital collections.