Museums also apparently have much larger backlogs. For digital library and museum collections to become more effective tools of service, institutions will have to find ways of building them into their normal operating activity. The era of special grants for these projects is ending. Intellectual property issues are abundant and unresolved. Libraries, which have traditionally placed the needs of users above those of authors or publishers, now find themselves in the position of authors or publishers as they create web-based collections and products.
Preservation issues are large.
No one is effectively addressing the preservation of the digital artifacts. There is an interesting convergence between traditional museum approaches and traditional library approaches to collections in the digital environment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which traditionally presented its collection of European paintings in carefully structured exhibits, now has placed digital representations of hundreds of these paintings in a database which anyone on the web can easily explore, in unmediated fashion. The presentation of digital collections is reviving libraries' interest in their special collections. Libraries are digitizing photographs, manuscripts, and other unique items much more actively than general-interest text collections.