Shared Collection Development, Digitization, and Owned Digital Collections

While library models already exist for sharing physical materials and joint licensing, this paper envisions an aspect of future collections involving a national digital collection owned, not licensed, by libraries. Collaborative collection development, digitization, and digital object management of owned collections can benefit societies in multiple ways, from expanding access to users otherwise unable to reach these materials, to preserving content even when disaster strikes, to reducing duplication of effort and expense in collection or digitization. This article will explore both the benefits of and the challenges to this type of collaboration

Data-Driven Reporting and Processing of Digital Archives with Brunnhilde

[Excerpt] Archivists are now several decades in to appraising, arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to digital archives and have developed and adopted a number of tools to aid in specific tasks along the way. This article discusses Brunnhilde, a new tool developed to address one of the first steps in working with born-digital materials: characterizing the overall contents of directories or disks to enable smart evidence-based decision-making in the appraisal, arrangement, and description processes

Digital Preservation for IRs

So you have built your IR and people are contributing data. Congrats! Now you are tasked with preserving this data long-term and don\u27t know where to start. This session will outline how to get started with digital preservation and special considerations for IR materials in the long-term. From identifying and selecting materials for preservation to storage concerns, and considerations for long-term management, this session will discuss digital preservation basics and how to enhance the sustainability of your IR materials

Campus Guide to Managing Digital Files

The Iowa State University Special Collections and University Archives is in the process of developing a program for acquiring and preserving born-digital materials (e.g. email, computer files, etc.). In the meantime, we offer the following recommendations for managing digital files generated by your department.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/speccoll_outreach/1001/thumbnail.jp

Can We Do More? An Examination of Potential Roles, Contributors, Incentives, and Frameworks to Sustain Large-Scale Digital Preservation

The many challenges of managing and preserving digital content are well known to cultural memory institutions. Institutions have become adept at digitizing and reformatting important content and ensuring its long-term access. At the same time, the nature, scale, and policy complexities of content that is born digital are presenting an even more radical shift in demands and expectations. An overwhelming amount of the knowledge, documentary evidence, and creative expression produced today originates in digital formats—from news reports to media to personal papers. While important initiatives have emerged to keep selected born-digital content accessible, in comparison to collecting policies of the analog age, we are preserving only a small portion of what exists. Is it enough? CLIR presidential fellow Carol Mandel investigates this question in a study of the societal and institutional frameworks that collect and preserve born-digital documentary evidence. She finds that while we continue to make impressive progress in addressing the daunting technical demands of preserving digital materials, our ability—and the impetus—to collect born-digital content lags far behind likely future needs for the documentation of today’s world. The decision to collect is an essential prerequisite to preservation and enduring access

How much does it cost? The LIFE Project - costing models for digital curation and preservation

Digital preservation is concerned with the long-term safekeeping of electronic resources. How can we be confident of their permanence, if we do not know the cost of preservation? The LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) Project has made a major step forward in understanding the long-term costs in this complex area. The LIFE Project has developed a methodology to model the digital lifecycle and to calculate the costs of preserving digital information for the next 5, 10 or 100 years. National and higher education (HE) libraries can now apply this process and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections. Based on previous work undertaken on the lifecycles of paper-based materials, the LIFE Project created a lifecycle model and applied it to real-life digital collections across a diverse subject range. Three case studies examined the everyday operations, processes and costs involved in their respective activities. The results were then used to calculate the direct costs for each element of the digital lifecycle. The Project has made major advances in costing preservation activities, as well as making detailed costs of real digital preservation activities available. The second phase of LIFE (LIFE2), which recently started, aims to refine the lifecycle methodology and to add a greater range and breadth to the project with additional exemplar case studies

A Linked Data Approach to Sharing Workflows and Workflow Results

A bioinformatics analysis pipeline is often highly elaborate, due to the inherent complexity of biological systems and the variety and size of datasets. A digital equivalent of the ‘Materials and Methods’ section in wet laboratory publications would be highly beneficial to bioinformatics, for evaluating evidence and examining data across related experiments, while introducing the potential to find associated resources and integrate them as data and services. We present initial steps towards preserving bioinformatics ‘materials and methods’ by exploiting the workflow paradigm for capturing the design of a data analysis pipeline, and RDF to link the workflow, its component services, run-time provenance, and a personalized biological interpretation of the results. An example shows the reproduction of the unique graph of an analysis procedure, its results, provenance, and personal interpretation of a text mining experiment. It links data from Taverna, myExperiment.org, BioCatalogue.org, and ConceptWiki.org. The approach is relatively ‘light-weight’ and unobtrusive to bioinformatics users

Best Practices for Digital Collections

To enhance access to their diverse materials, libraries are digitizing those materials and making them freely available online as digital collections on digital platforms. These collections provide another way for libraries to re-envision their materials and make them relevant to their communities. This presentation will cover best practices for creating and preserving digital collections, including workflows, standards, and staffing. It will also discuss the policies which should be developed for building successful digital collections, as well as the privacy issues which should be considered. In this presentation, individual digital collections from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Creighton University Law Library, including the Omaha Oral History Collection, Nebraska Collections, and Delaney Tokyo Trial Papers, will be demonstrated. Learning Objectives: Identify best practices for creating a digital collection, Identify policies needed for presenting digital collections on a digital repository or platform, Identify privacy issues to consider when creating a digital collection

A New-Old Role for Libraries.

Tenopir discusses the the Nov 2008 annual Charleston Conference: Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition-- The Best of Times, the Worst of Times. The discussions at Charleston focused on preserving born-digital materials, not just digitizing old analog or print items

UNL Libraries Deposit Programs

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries offers several avenues for preserving and providing access to digital and physical research materials. This document outlines the four main avenues for depositing materials with UNL Libraries. Although there are separate repositories with specific missions—Archives & Special Collections, DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska–Lincoln, UNL Data Repository, and UNL Image & Multimedia Collections—all work together toward the goal of preserving the intellectual and creative output of the university and to make our contributions discoverable to state, national, and international communities. This document describes the operations of each repository. The Libraries policy is to publish, or provide online access to, materials (1) when the Libraries holds copyright, (2) when the copyright holder has granted the Libraries permission for online publication, or (3) when the Libraries do not hold copyright but may manage access behind a firewall. The University Libraries is committed to preserving and providing access to the full range of in-tellectual contributions of the faculty and staff at UNL for the benefit of current and future gen-erations. All members of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln are encouraged to deposit content with UNL Libraries. Materials deposited in our institutional repositories are historical and not all historical events confirm to current standards of civility. As such, they may contain racial or sexual stereotypes that are inappropriate by today’s standards. They have been retained in order to fully represent the materials in their original context. All members of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln are encouraged to deposit content with UNL Libraries. Content can be nondigital items supplied to Archives & Special Collections or digital content deposited in the Data, Image & Multimedia Collections, Digital Commons repositories, or University Archives