Open textbook initiatives have appeared as an alternative to traditional publishing. These initiatives for the production of alternatively copyrighted educational resources provide a way of sharing materials through the Web. While the open model of peer-produced materials enables the global reuse of textbooks, the combination of fragments to…

Given the rising number of information resources available, it is increasingly important for digital libraries and archives to create usable services that meet their users' needs. Seeking input from users at all stages of development can help achieve this goal. This article briefly defines four methodologies for gathering user input: focus groups,…

Scrapbooks present a particularly challenging set of preservation issues to archivists. However, as an intriguing combination of diaries, photograph albums, and ephemera, their format and arrangement are an essential part of their usefulness as sources to researchers. The fascinating link between scrapbooks and quilts, evident in a brief history…

Serving as a case study of a photographic digitization project in a midsize repository, this article describes a project at the Weill Cornell Medical Center Archives. The author examines six components that the archivist needs to contemplate when planning a digitization project: selecting the images to be digitized, understanding the needs of the…

This article highlights the California Cultures Project as a case study examining the architecture and framework required to support the deployment of digital objects as virtual collections at the California Digital Library. Chronologically arranged, it describes the Online Archive of California (OAC) Working Group's functional requirements for…