The same can be said for digitally reformatted art, artifacts, manuscripts, sound recordings, video clips, and other materials that UC's academic departments, libraries, museums, and archives are creating and making available to online libraries. As more of these treasures become available via the World Wide Web they will be easier to access and use by a far broader body than they are presently. However, our work with these kinds of materials is less mature than that with scholarly journals, reference databases, and online catalogs. And the payoffs from that work are not as readily apparent in current research, teaching, and learning.

One reason for this is that few digitally reformatted collections offer the mass of information that faculty are accustomed to finding on their library's shelves or in online journal and reference databases. They remain by and large as "cabinets of curiosities" -- interesting, appealing, but lacking the substance and depth that may be necessary to support university-level teaching (let alone research).

As our collections of digitally reformatted material grow we expect that usage of them will significantly increase. And our collections are growing all the time. In the next year, the digitally reformatted materials available via the Online Archive of California (OAC) and the Museums and the Online Archive of California (MOAC) could double, and the 220,000 digital images of art historical and architectural works that are being produced by the UCSD library may be available to UC users via ARTstor (a subscription-based service that is being developed by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).

Perhaps the first evidence of real critical mass is only a few weeks away. In June, the CDL will be launching on a trial basis an online service where users can find and view some 180,000 digital images of works of art and architecture. The service will be piloted with faculty and students over a four- or five-month period to study how it is being used, how it might be modified, and whether it should be continued.

Through this kind of experimentation, we should refine our understanding of what digitally reformatted information faculty and students want and need, and how they prefer to use these materials in their research, teaching, and learning. This will only help us to build online collections that more effectively serve the University and its scholarly community.