web archives & research collections

Transcription

1 forging the future, preserving the past: web archives & research collections Geoff Harder, Archive-it Partner Meetings BPE 2012,

2 The task is to extract information out of noisy data, Knox says. It is a detective story, trying to find out what s there. What makes the detectives job more difficult is that medieval scribes did not necessarily reuse pages from which text had been erased in the same order or even orientation as the original manuscript. And a further complication is that some texts were erased and reused twice, leading to double palimpsests. Source: acf5ca5a-01f3-11e2-81ba-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2dzlts2gq

3 Born Digital Production Digitization GIS Web Archiving Repository Services Research Data Curation Digital Preservation Digital Forensics Toolkits for Discovery, Access and Use Archive-it Partner Meeting 2012

4 What happens when we think in the broadest of terms about what our collection needs to be? What changes if we increase our digital collecting?

5 New Interpretations for Libraries and our staff: - Selectors as curators of collections: - selection, acquisition, provision, manipulation, and preservation of information - requires workflows for paper reams to data streams - Why? - Growing demand for a diversity of formats web, born-digital, raw data - Interdisciplinary research highlights gaps in capturing scholarly discourse - Growing interest in digital archives and digital preservation - Recognition by research community that digital bits are important but increasing anxiety about what this actually means for their work Archive-it Partners Meeting 2012

6 Discovery Access Curation Web Archiving Preservation Reuse Archive-it Partner Meeting 2012

7 New interpretations of librarian roles Curation Selecting (e.g. analog, digital, web, multimedia, data), digitization (analog ghettos); collection building (not hording); prioritization Preservation Risk identification, risk assessment, valuation, authenticity, quality assurance, strategizing (e.g. partnerships) Access & Reuse Use case development, requirements specification, issues resolution, tool selection/development, subject expertise, feedback loop, production inputs, teaching/training, advisors on copyright and usage Discovery Use cases, requirements specification, issues resolution, metadata guidance, subject expertise, feedback loop, marketing and sales Archive-it Partner Meetings 2012

8 today s research libraries are focusing less on the public and technical services paradigm of old (front of the house and back of the house, so to speak), and more on building the trio of strong infrastructures, content, and services. Walters & Skinner, 2011 Infrastructure: facilities, technology, human expertise Content: ALL the information resources at a library s disposal (i.e. born-digital, licensed, purchased, or otherwise captured and curated) Services: traditional and emergent services think of your collections as data (L. Johnston, LoC, BPE 2011) Archive-it Partner Meeting 2012

9 Roadmap from Walters & Skinner (2011) - Stop waiting and start proactive engagement locally - Stake a claim in the production cycle - Start retraining and repurposing staff roles for digital curation as a core function of the academic library - Be a doer, not a broker, wherever possible - Consider digital curation collaborations - Actualize collaborative engagement Arcive-it Partners Meeting 2012

10 - 9 respondents - Mix of undocumented, ad hoc procedures and policies to more refined individual steps for QA, permissions, metadata, etc. - Mostly individuals, not systems - State libraries and state archives with mandates tend to put more effort into aligning HR - Collection development and maintenance varies by collection scope, profile and priority

11 A work in progress: þ Commitment: Our collection will include web archives. Planning and organization: Born Digital Working Group, Archive-it collection coordinators (10), selectors (31), Web Archives central tech (1), Data Curation Librarian (Intern), scalability planning process (2013), environmental scan (2013); HuCo archive and data mining project Awareness and training : increased communication and transparency 2013: new website/gateway, project docs, status updates; internal - meeting minutes, training (e.g. webinars); SLIS training Pipelines and infrastructure e.g. Archive-it workflows, metadata/ discovery planning, born digital policies, preservation planning Forward-looking: Partnerships for curation, description, discovery, computational access, preservation Archive-it Partners Meeting 2012

12 Collections Policy Policy and Procedures for Born Digital Collections Web archiving Guidelines for Selectors Permission Form and Letters Web archives Metadata and Cataloguing Policies and Guidelines Individual Collection workflows

13 basic architecture Archive-it IA storage DC record MARC cataloging Collection/seed Archive-it portal OAI-PMH Local discovery (Sirsi, Primo, WA Portal) SIP to AIP (Archivematica with PREMIS) Local storage Research Data (ingest API) Preservation storage

14 Balancing goals with available resources Find new ways of sustainable collection development As everyone knows: to put another block on top you must first pull one out from somewhere else - make foundational Archive-it Partners Meeting 2012

15 We need help! 1) Active community best practice exchange for sustainable, scalable, timely collection development [Action item: share documentation] 2) Discovery what is your integration strategy? Metadata description; records sharing and exchange MARC, DC, MODS, other full text indexing Access pathways paths of least resistance 3) Marketing and communications how to raise awareness and understanding of web collections