Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Developing Collecting Areas Through Digital Surrogate Donations: Are The Benefits Worth The Risks?, Kevin C. Miller

Pepperdine University Libraries

Special collections librarians at small or medium sized institutions may lack the resources required to build new collecting areas or further enrich the collecting areas mandated by their mission. As one measure to overcome this challenge at Pepperdine University, we are experimenting with an approach that we call “digital surrogate” donations. In these cases, we work with donors to create digital surrogates—typically scans of images or texts—of select physical materials with which donors are not quite ready to part. Per a modified donor agreement, the digital surrogate collections are then made available to researchers through our digital archive and open …