When the original case study was published in 2009, the staff of the BOPCRIS Digitization Centre at the University of Southampton’s Hartley Library had recently completed three large scale, grant funded digitization projects and was exploring different means of ensuring access to the digital content they had created. An early experiment with local hosting had shown that the Library was unprepared to deal with the on-going costs of maintaining these resources, and they turned to external content providers—ProQuest and JSTOR—for deals that would allow them to focus on their core competency of digitization. Over the past two years, the changing economic climate has led to sharp cutbacks in British public funding for large scale digitization, the unit’s specialty. As a result, the staff has worked to reshape the unit, scaling back its capacity for mass digitization, focusing on materials from Southampton’s local collections, and finding partners that can deliver previously digitized content at a lower cost—and changing its name from “BOPCRIS” to the “University of Southampton Library Digitization Unit,” which more clearly identifies their connection to the university.

 

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