Today's class was all about collecting rare books for special collections. There was in interesting article drawn from an interview with Thomas Staley, the director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. The article addresses Staley’s success as the director of the Ransom center which comes from Staley’s focused acquisition policy. Staley aggressively seeks out and purchases the manuscript archives of modern authors. According to Staley, he wants to create THE humanities archive for ‘modern’ authors. The idea that with one stop, everything a researcher needs will be available to them, the specific collection, and all relevant collections, in one single location, a special collection Walmart if you will. This is part of a Texan mindset of bigger, better, best. However, Staley doesn’t address the issue that if collections were digitized then all collections would be available to any researcher from a single location, the internet! Staley doesn’t even beg