High-Level Requirements for a Bit Preservation System University of Maryland Libraries

The mission of the high-level requirements for a bit preservation system at the University of Maryland Libraries is to provide a plan for digital content management services in all phases of content’s lifecycle, including selection, creation, acquisition, and disposition

University of Maryland Libraries: Digital Preservation Policy

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries, in keeping with its mission “To enable the intellectual inquiry and learning required to meet the education, research and community outreach mission of the university,” serves as a trusted caretaker of the UMD Libraries’ collections, including those in digital format. The Digital Preservation Policy supports this mission and is the highest-level digital preservation policy document in the UMD Libraries. The Policy makes explicit the UMD Libraries’ commitment to preserving content selected for retention by collection managers. It defines a comprehensive digital preservation program for both born-analog and born-digital collections. The audience for this policy includes UMD Libraries employees, digital content contributors, donors, and users

MARAC Poster Session Descriptions, Spring 2017

Program with descriptions for the posters presented during the Spring 2017 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC

The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania: Using Facebook to Document a Community

In 2013, Temple University PhD candidate Melissa R. Meade started a Facebook page for the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, to share and curate material relevant to her community-based ethnographic dissertation project. The page has evolved into a place in which community members meet and gather digitally to reflect upon history, memories, culture, and media of the greater Anthracite Region. While Facebook practically serves as an excellent platform for communication, it is not symbiotic for necessary cataloging, searching, and archiving of information. The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania is a work in progress with endless possibilities. For this talk, we intend to focus on a description of the Facebook page and community, and discuss our attempts to extract data, our ideas of how we might use that data to further scholarship and understanding of the history of the region, and discuss challenges in bridging these divides

Displaying a Poster, Unifying a Campus: Undergraduate Research Day at Penn State Wilkes-Barre

<p>This article describes the first official Undergraduate Research Day at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, a small campus with approximately 550 undergraduate students and 8 four-year degree programs. In 2015, an informal planning committee, consisting of two librarians and two faculty members, embarked on a project to turn what had been an informal course assignment into a campus-wide research event.  By remaining flexible, engaged, and open to collaboration, the committee made Undergraduate Research Day in April 2015 a success, and plans are underway to hold this event in subsequent years.  The event energized and motivated students, faculty, and staff on campus and paved the way toward a unified organizational identity on campus.</p

Designing a Bit Preservation System

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014Posters, Demos and Developer "How-To's"Despite successful operation of DSpace and Fedora repositories, much of the digital preservation work performed at the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries is focused more on backup and restoration of files than on actual archiving and preservation. The Digital Systems and Stewardship (DSS) division has begun a project to examine gaps, risks, and inefficiencies in the current systems, as well as to build support for new functionalities, such as the curation of active research datasets that are used and can be updated over time. Our first phase of repository development narrows the scope to bit-level preservation and access services. We define bit-level preservation as preservation regardless of the semantics or intellectual content of what is included in a file (content, virus, encryption, intellectual content, etc.), the file format, and how files are semantically interrelated. During high-level requirements development, it became clear that this bit-level preservation system, rather than representing just a back-end for our existing systems, can provide digital content management services in all phases of content’s lifecycle, including selection, creation, acquisition, and disposition. This paper will discuss the decision to design a bit-level preservation system, our high-level requirements, and our investigation and implementation plans.Wallberg, Ben (University of Maryland Libraries, USA)Knies, Jennie Levine (University of Maryland Libraries, USA)Hamidzadeh, Babak (University of Maryland Libraries, USA

Catching Up: Creating a Digital Preservation Policy

The University of Maryland Libraries have been managing digital content for about a decade without an official digital preservation policy. The Libraries’ 2013 Strategic Plan called for the development of preservation plans, including "bit-preservation, digital object preservation, and metadata management pertaining to preservation of digital objects and their aggregations." A task force examined policies at other institutions and evaluated needs and strategic directions. The resulting high-level policy and appendix based on the Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC) will direct all future planning, policies, and implementation. This case study will describe the process and planned steps towards implementation