Mapping the Intersection of Selection and Funding

The question of how libraries can develop a program of systematic funding capable of supporting a sustained digital-reformatting effort and meeting institutional priorities for what should be digitized is not easy to address. While thinking of this earlier in the week, I was also listening to a CD of Stephen Sondheim hits. Ethel Merman's familiar, huge voice belted out tunes from her hit Gypsy, which, as you all know, is based on the life of the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. You gotta have a gimmick,' an older and wiser stripper tells a young Gypsy, if you wanna get ahead. Of course her kind of gimmick-dazzling lights, or even pizazz-is not what libraries are necessarily after. The digital world already has plenty of pizazz. The question is, how can libraries frame or shape programs that will attract funding, whether from external sources or redirected from internal budgets already stretched thin, sufficient to warrant the time and energy required? Are we even ready for systematic funding if it becomes available? And if so, what is our gimmick? Libraries have been down this road before, of course, when they began to look for systematic funding for preservation microfilming. The same question arose of the contention between what foundations and the federal government were interested in preserving and what local institutions saw as their preservation priorities. This conflict was never completely resolved, nor will it be in the new digital world unless the procedures become so easy and the costs so low that external funding support for digital projects is not required. There are no ready answers to these questions. Libraries can be proud of what has been accomplished in the reformatting programs of the last 15 to 20 years, both in terms of the product (over 700,000 rescued brittle books) and raising public support for and awareness of the paper deterioration problem. We should take our success in that arena seriously. It may be instructive to see if experience can provide any ideas that will work in the digital world. Then we can look at what makes the digital world different and what might affect funding and support.