MANAGING AN OIL SHALE LEGACY COLLECTION

The Arthur Lakes Library at the Colorado School of Mines houses a legacy collection of oil shale materials, most dating from the 1920s to the 1980s. The collection is an aggregate from 23 donors, including individuals, government agencies, and corporate entities. Materials include technical reports, personal papers, and historical documents, organized by donor in archival boxes. Interest in oil shale as a potential energy source has been cyclical, and generates periodic interest in the legacy collection. Sustained, heightened interest in oil shale in the past few years resulted in a Library project to reassess the collection by present-day standards.

Users expect a modern research experience, with organized, indexed, easily accessible — preferably digitized — items. Project results indicate that with time and money we can begin to meet these expectations. However, some difficult information management issues will need to be addressed. Donor agreements may include restrictions on how their portions of the collection may be used. Corporate donations include potentially proprietary materials that were deemed “valueless” at the end of the last oil shale boom in the 1980s, but may have value again today. Pros and cons exist for organizing by material type versus organizing by donor. Digitization, although desirable, is problematic. Establishing who owns copyright for obtaining digital permissions will be time consuming. Responding to user expectations entails costs to the Library that need to be weighed against benefits to various user communities.