Collaborative development of born-digital archives to facilitate discovery | DCDC14
1. If together we build it
they will come
Toward collaborative development of born-digital
archives to facilitate discovery
Judy Burg, University Archivist
Chris Awre, Head of Information Management
Library and Learning Innovation
DCDC conference, 29-30th October 2014
2. The Field of Dreams (as seen from Hull)
• (Re-)creating archive tools and systems for the digital world
• Born-digital records not as a subset of archives – but as the
current and future reality of archives
• Needs work beyond any single archive office
• Model of AIMS project – outputs and experience
• Creating a shared direction of travel
• Exploring how to get there
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4. Print to digital
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Print Digital
Books E-Books
Journals E-Journals
Reference works Online reference works /
The Internet
Videos/DVDs YouTube, NetFlix, etc.
CDs iTunes, Spotify, etc.
Slides Flickr, Google Images, etc.
Theses E-Theses, EThOS
6. Owning to renting
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Elsevier
Wiley
Sage
Jisc Collections
Netflix
7. Shift to the network level
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Resources
ERM
Discovery
Subject guides
Reading lists
Library management systems
8. How do born-digital archives relate to these
trends?
• A born-digital archive is focused on managing digital
material (of course)
• Born-digital archive content can be part of a personal library
– And a valuable part of this
• Focus on ownership, not rental
– Each archive’s content is unique
• Move to the network level?
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9. Network benefits
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Practical benefit
- Delivering more
value locally
Economic benefit
- Scaling up delivery
Technical benefit
- Concentrated development
Born-digital archive
10. Jisc Spotlight on the Digital
• Focus on digitised collections and their
management/accessibility over time
• Highlighted need for
– Institutional capacity building
– Benefit of working with network level services, e.g.,
aggregators
– Network level foresight and oversight of collection
management and delivery
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11. Collaboration in action (examples)
• CURL
– Produced COPAC union catalogue
• Data centres
– MIMAS/EDINA
• NB. Archives Hub at MIMAS
• SHEDL – Scottish HE Digital Libraries
– Service provider to Scottish Universities
• Northern Collaboration
– Recognised need to work together to develop services
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12. Collaboration in action (archives)
• Archives & Records Council Wales Digital Preservation
Consortium
– Joint initiative to explore use of Archivematica to serve
Welsh archives
• ArchivesSpace development
– US institutional consortium developing archives
management system
• Edinburgh now implementing this as part of partnership
• Janus website of Cambridge College archives
– Also Archives Hub and Hull History Centre catalogue
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13. AIMS – An Inter-institutional Model for
Stewardship of born-digital archives
• Mellon-funded project 2009-11
– Hull, Stanford, Virginia, Yale
• Technology agnostic
• Focused on model of practice and operation
• Identified many common threads in archive activity
• Challenge of implementation
– How to put the model into practice
– Needs further collaboration
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15. Collaboration – to be
or not to be?
• Waiting for someone else to open Pandora’s box and find an
answer
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16. Barriers to collaboration: inertia
• Waiting for the perfect tool
• Numerous projects and initiatives which “might lead to
something”
• Implicit shared perception that development could/should
have wide application across the archive sector
• Waiting for perfect funding call
• Not yet an explicit shared understanding of what is needed
• Little incentive to initiate or lead major new project
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17. Barriers to collaboration: cost and capacity
• Limited capacity within individual archive office
• Uncertainty over scope of project – given uncertainty over shared
aims and requirements
• Need for scoping project prior to development
• Potential cost of development
• Uncertainty over cost of development
• Limited prospect of commercial gain
• Waiting for perfect funding call (but without an ‘on the shelf’
proposal)
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18. Barriers to collaboration: size of the challenge
• Lack of explicit shared understanding of next steps
• Limited explicit shared understanding of direction of travel
• Few shared axiomatic principles
• Perception that there are no ‘small steps’ or quick wins
• Additional challenge of dealing with access restrictions and
rights management issues
• Requirements for archive arrangement and description are
complicated!
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19. Collaboration – to be?
Archive collaboration works well for
• ‘types’ of archive (eg literary,
political, business)
• Use-cases (eg education,
digitization)
• definable consortia (eg AIM25,
A&RC Wales)
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20. Collaboration – to be?
Archive collaboration works well for
• Definable projects and outputs (eg
digitisation, disaster reaction)
• Lead organisation and other
contributors share technical and
strategic objectives (TNA and A2A,
OCLC and RLUK research projects)
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21. Define and foster collaboration
• What is needed to get it off the ground?
• How can common areas be identified?
• How can variance be accounted for – within collaborative
structure and defined outcomes?
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22. Finding next steps
• Contact us to be involved in further discussions
• Propose to set up a Google Group
• C.awre@hull.ac.uk
• J.burg@hull.ac.uk
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AIMS project –
Created spec for functionality needed – but that is only part of the story
Ricky Erway at OCLC published a paper called 'Swatting the Long Tail of Digital Media:
A Call for Collaboration' in 2012. This focused on the inability of any one institution to be able to deal with every type of physical media that digital material is donated on. It's available at:
http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2012/2012-08.pdf
At the end he calls for indications of interest. What came of this I'm not sure exactly, but in August this year a follow-on report was published, called 'Agreement Elements for Outsourcing Transfer of Born Digital Content', which lays out a framework for how an archive can work with an external centre that can deal with a particular physical media. Details at:
http://oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-born-digital-content-transfer-2014-a4.pdf
