Acquiring Unique Collections: Collaborative Approaches to Metadata

Acquisition of unique digital material is an ongoing challenge for Special Collections units—often unique digital material comes with little or no metadata associated with the digital objects. Using two ongoing projects at the University of Oregon Libraries as case studies, this paper explores strategies archivists and librarians can use to increase descriptive metadata coming in with unique born-digital collections. Library staff involved with the Latino Roots and University of Oregon Veterans Oral History projects work with the content creators, in this case faculty and students, to build collections with rich descriptive information that is relevant both to librarians and to the communities being documented.