Neither fish nor fowl...

I saw this on twitter, thanks to Merrilee and Mazarines:
Jackie Dooley will be heading up a new survey of archives & special collections in academic & research libraries, that will follow up on the ARL Hidden Collections Survey from 1998.

The update includes an effort to survey even more institutions this time around, including Oberlin Group colleges, ARL libraries, and RLG Partnership members. This is great. I'm really glad to see that there are efforts being made to make the next survey more inclusive.

Unfortunately, since my institution is not an ARL Library, and is not part of the RLG Partnership, or the Oberlin Group, I won't get to take this survey.

We are neither fish nor fowl. We are part of a large institution in terms of enrollment (~25,000 students), but like (I imagine) many other Directional State Universities, our budgetary resources are not very large in relation to the number of students that our university serves.

We're not big enough to be ARL/RLG, and not small enough to be Oberlin Group, so you won't see our approximately 40,000-50,000 dime novels in need of cataloging (we're working on it), our entire range of SF periodicals and pulps that we're slowly working to uncover, and the 12,000+ single-issue comics in our collection as part of that survey, despite the fact that I'd wager that our overall special collections and archival holdings would be larger than that of many Oberlin Group colleges.

I'm really, really glad to see the expansion of the Hidden Collections survey program to be more inclusive of different kinds of libraries. I just wonder when the circle will be cast wide enough to include my library.