Pennsylvania Digital Library - Guidelines

Draft guidelines for a Pennsylvania Digital Library initiative are posted here for comment by scholars, educators, and staff of libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions. When complete, these guidelines will outline a plan for the development of digital collections "for, by, and about" the history, society, and culture of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Although the guidelines are intended to encourage collecting institutions to follow these priorities insofar as this may be consistent with the organization's mission, they are not intended in any way to be prescriptive. PACSCL has placed the draft guidelines on this site as part of a collaborative effort to give them broad distribution during this open comment period.

The guidelines are based on three meetings of a panel of scholars, educators, and librarians from around the state as well as email and telephone interviews with other librarians and scholars. Comments on the draft are encouraged; although the deadline for the first round of comments has passed, additional comments will be considered for later revisions. Send comments to the Guidelines Team. Additional documentation on the project can be found at the project wiki: http://padl.pbwiki.com

This project has been funded by monies available through the Federal Library Services and Technology Act and is an element of a larger effort sponsored by the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee on Collaborative Digitization, a cooperative of the State Library, the Bureau of Library Development in the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium Inc. (PALCI), Access PA, and PALINET, an organization serving all types of libraries in the Mid-Atlantic region.

The project was jointly administered by the following library organizations:

• PALCI, the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc., headquartered in Pittsburgh
• PALINET, a regional library network serving institutions in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and West Virginia, headquartered in Philadelphia
• State Library of Pennsylvania, a division of the Office of Commonwealth Libraries under the Pennsylvania Department of Education, headquartered in Harrisburg

• Laura Blanchard, Executive Director, Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL)
• Caryn Carr, Director, State Library of Pennsylvania
• Tom Clareson, Program Director for New Initiatives, PALINET
• Dan Iddings, Executive Director, PALCI
• Bob Kieft, Librarian of the College & Director of College Information Resources, Haverford College (Chair, PALCI Cooperative Collection Development Task Force)
• Katherine Skinner, Consultant
• John Barnett, Assistant Director, PALCI (wiki administrator)
• Cheryl Greer, Electronic Resources Librarian, PALCI

Image, above: Detail, William Penn, Charter of Privileges for the Province of Pennsylvania, 1701, American Philosophical Society. Additional images and more information>>