Digital CurationInstitutional Repository Committee

Helen R. TibboSchool of Information and Library Science UNC-Chapel Hill

Thank you to all involved in this effort!

What is this All About?

Digital preservation and curation stand as grand opportunities and challenges of the first decade of the 21st century.

Universities have critical roles to play in fostering and supporting wise and appropriate curation of campus digital assets.

Why Are We Doing This?

The university is replete with rich intellectual assets in digital form to support teaching, research, and service.

Inherently fragile digital objects are far more likely to persist over time within a centralized and managed repository than on isolated servers across campus.

Campus Digital Assets

Examples of digital assets & images.

Digital Curation

Is the active management and preservation of digital resources over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest, and over time for current and future generations of users.

Digital Curation

It involves time-sensitive appraisal by creators and archivists, evolving provision of intellectual access, mid-term preservation including backups and transformations such as migration, and ultimately, for some materials, a commitment to centuries-long archiving.

Digital Curation

Digital curation is stewardship that provides for the reproducibility and re-use of authentic digital data and other digital assets.

Digital Curation

Essential to the longevity of digital resources and the success of curation efforts are: Trusted and durable digital repositories, Principles of sound metadata construction, Use of open standards for file formats and

data encoding, and The promotion of information management

literacy.

Cliff Lynch (CNI) on IRs

… a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.

No other restrictions/implications about content.

Organizational Commitment

It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.

Necessarily Collaborative

While operational responsibility for these services may reasonably be situated in different organizational units at different universities, an effective institutional repository of necessity represents collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records mangers, faculty, and university administrators and policymakers.

Not Just Technology

At any given point in time, an institutional repository will be supported by a set of information technologies, but a key part of the services that comprise an institutional repository is the management of technological changes, and the migration of digital content from one set of technologies to the next as part of the organizational commitment to providing repository services. An institutional repository is not simply a fixed set of software and hardware.

Vision

Trusted repository for UNC’s digital assets.

Vision

Trusted repository for UNC’s digital assets.

Model for the state, nation, and world. We have 2 years to make this work!

How we’re going about this…

Committee Structure

Steering Committee DC/IR Committee Scholarly Communications Committee

Steering Committee

Sarah Michalak, Chair José-Marie Griffiths, SILS Lolly Gasaway, Law School Robert Peet, Biology Helen Tibbo, SILS Jack Snoeyink, Computer Science

DC/IR Committee

Priscilla Alden, ITS Alan Blatecky, RENCI Robyn East, ITS Jaroslav Folda, Art Lolly Gasaway, Law Charlie Green, ITS Carolyn Hank, SILS Debra Hanken Kurtz, AAL Andy Hart, AAL Robert Henshaw, ITS

Janis Holder, U. Archives Paul Jones, ibiblio Susan Kellogg, B School Cal Lee, SILS Wallace McLendon, HSL James Noblitt, Romance Lang. Mark Simpson-Vos, UNC Press Natasha Smith, AAL - DocSouth Vin Steponaitis, Anthropology Helen Tibbo, SILS Ellen Whisler, SILS

DC/IR Committee’s Charge

Develop a feasible plan that will both serve UNC-Chapel Hill’s curation needs and will place the University in the forfront of such efforts in the Triangle, nationally, and internationally.

DC/IR Committee’s Charge

Design a pilot institutional repository and digital preservation program in partnership with Information Technology Services (ITS), the University Library, and the School of Information and Library Science (SILS).

DC/IR Committee’s Charge

Develop policies, procedures, and long-term digital data preservation strategies to benefit the entire campus. This will include strategies to educate the campus community.

DC/IR Committee Structure

Organized into 4 subcommittees based on the RLG-NARA Audit Checklist for Certifying Digital Repositories . Governance Community and Digital Assets (CDA) Repository Management (RM) Technologies and Technical Infrastructure (TTI)

We added a 5th subcommittee Guidance Training and Engagement (GTE).

Projected Activities – Year 1

Form working groups within the larger committee. These will be based on the RLG/NARA Draft Audit Checklist for Certifying Digital Repositories along with a working group for participant training and guidance.

Provide each working group with charges and select a chair for each.

Explore current international, state-of-the-art, practices, policies, and research in digital curation and create a white paper on this topic.

Projected Activities – Year 1

Strategically select communities and materials for inclusion in a small-scale, but diverse, pilot repository.

Develop the technical and repository management infrastructures for a pilot digital repository for the group of communities/materials at UNC-Chapel Hill selected in step 4.

Recommend standards such as file formats, optimal storage media, minimal/optimal/practical metadata requirements, and procedures for migrating and refreshing deposited content thus laying the groundwork for a much larger implementation in the future.

Projected Activities – Year 1

Document the guidelines and procedures developed in step 6.

Develop an engagement strategy and infrastructure on campus.

Coordinate with the scholarly communications committee to develop a process to establish policies for use of an institutional repository at UNC.

Coordinate with the scholarly communications committee to create initial policy documents for an institutional repository.

Projected Activities – Year 2

Expand the contents of the repository with additional digital assets from a variety of communities across campus. New types are materials will be selected to expand the capabilities of the repository.

Explore research data curation issues on campus.

Conduct a strategic, campus-wide examination of digital curation issues, needs, centers of expertise, and best-case responses at UNC in light of cutting-edge practices, research, and experience identified in Year 1.

Project Activities – Year 2

Develop an overall, initial strategic plan for digital curation at UNC-Chapel in light of its teaching, research, and service roles in light of best practices and the pilot repository experience.

Provide digital curation guidance documents, tools, and engagement opportunities to the campus.

Seek evaluation of our efforts, guidance documents and tools, and the initial institutional repository from campus and external reviewers, perhaps in the form of a certification audit.

Create proposal for the future of the institutional repository and digital curation efforts on campus, including a sustainability plan.

Naming Opportunity…

Keeping Carolina: Preserving Access to Carolina’s Digital Assets