New models for open digital collections?

Abstract

This article discusses the potential for new community-based funding models to support digitization and open access (OA) publishing of digital collections. Digital collections of archival material such as texts, images and moving images are an important complement to journals and books in the ecosystem of scholarly resources that researchers, teachers and learners use. However, institutions find them expensive to acquire from publishers or to digitize themselves. In the US, Reveal Digital (RD) has set up a 'library crowdfunding' programme based on a cost-recovery OA model. The article describes how Jisc has collaborated with RD to introduce the model to UK institutions through their 'Independent Voices' collection of 20th-century alternative press materials and, in doing so, explores the potential and challenges for developing a similar approach in the UK.