Articulating Value: Building a Culture of Assessment in Special Collections

Abstract

The article discusses the need for special collections and archives to move beyond celebrating the value of their treasures to documenting and showing evidence of the impact of these treasures. Due to changing times and decreasing budgets, it has allegedly become important for organizations to become more relevant by connecting the value of their collections to greater academic enterprise and to the development of their users as scholars and learners. In the past, librarians and archivists have used instinctual and rhetorical strategies for expressing the value of their collections. According to the author, the estimate of research value needs to be confirmed by hard data using scientific assessment.