Sustainable Enterprise Strategies for Optimizing Digital Stewardship by Angela I. Fritz

Author:Angela I. Fritz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

From Subject Curators to Functional Specialists

Central to these organizational changes within GLAM institutions is a gradual shift from subject curatorial–based roles to more functional-based positions with a focus on mainstreaming distinctive collections. As information technology reshapes the approach to digital stewardship as well as collection use, there is a greater urgency to deconstruct traditional parameters that have distinguished distinctive and unique collections and services into siloed collection spaces. With these changes, archivists, librarians, and museum curators have had to reexamine longstanding assumptions relating to collection care, which has been grounded in traditional education and professional training, long-held organizational structures, and mid-century approaches to collection-management and research services, as well as in the contours of GLAM professional history and work culture.

Historically, distinctive collections have tended to be highly independent organizational units because the nature of specialized materials require a close mediation that is guided by subject expertise within a curatorial-based organizational structure that situates and fortifies institutional knowledge of collections within a unit and, more specifically, with one person. Additionally, subject-based curatorial responsibilities often focus on the physicality of collection care and analog preservation. For many special collections, museums, and archives, subject-based positions focus on highlighting the special expertise required in not only servicing collections in physical reading rooms but also for the collection management of unique primary sources, which are housed and managed in environmentally controlled, secure collection spaces. In this context, a curator’s focus is inward—the physical stewardship of collections as well as honing a subject specialization based on highly mediated encounters in physical spaces. Increasingly, the need for subject specializations within libraries, museums, and archives is being met by distinctive collection teams with a technical functional-base expertise framed by principles of digital stewardship.28

In recent years, academic libraries, in particular, have seen similar parallel transformations with subject selectors’ roles. As a result, libraries are moving away from a collection development liaison model in favor of more functional-related positions focusing on research and engagement, metadata management, and the widening umbrella of “digital initiatives.” This shift reflects the academic liaison’s ever-broadening range of duties, including proficiencies with emerging digital literacies, course-embedded research support, individual research consultations, data management, and digital humanities specializations. This shift also requires greater flexibility to allow the institution to “pivot” with the evolving needs of the institution’s users. The rise of functional-based positions represents the need for a more sustainable approach to organizational development that enables agility in personnel resources and a broader view of collection management that incorporates digital strategies and stewardship activities early in the lifecycle management of digital assets. This functional-based model also requires new skill development at unit and program levels, as collection librarians, museum curators, and archivists move away from position descriptions focused solely on subject expertise and toward specialized areas that highlight functional knowledge and technical and digital expertise.29

In addition, an emphasis on blended positions is an important means in building an institutional culture that emphasizes versatility, collaborations, and collective problem-solving in the area of digital collections management. Blended positions require

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