I ended the day with the session on graphics in the archive. my biggest take away was that the role of a digital collections (fill in the blank) is a composite role of archivist, researcher, curator and cataloger. As Cathleen Lu and Hillary Kativa emphasized, the role of archivist includes the act of accessing digital collections, arranging them, describing them, preserving them and providing acces. We must also think like researchers and acknowledge that the in person facilitated reference interview will not be the same in an online environment. As curators they stressed the importance of having a digital collections policy as a guide for how to manage these growing collections. And finally as catalogers we must walk a fine line between being informative and providing greater context and treading too far into being interpretive.
I wonder how we can take advantage of current in-house expertise from catalogers and preservationists, who may be able to help us meet these new challenges.