Stewarding Your Institution’s

Scholarly, Historical, and Cultural

Heritage (SHCH)

June 4, 2010

Kent Gerber

Digital Library Manager,

Bethel University

Harness and apply our institution’s

internal knowledge assets • Broaden their reach

• Extend their value

• Actively steward them through the whole Digital

Lifecycle

Each College and University is a rich source of valuable intellectual content in digital and analog form. • Theses & Dissertations • Faculty Work • Institutional & Departmental Publications

• Symposia • Lectures and Community Events • Art Galleries and Special Collections

• Teaching Resources • Images for Teaching and Research • Data Sets

Facing a digital dark age • Easier personal storage allowed anyone to save

their materials but important objects are being

lost to:

Community member attrition

Technological obsolescence

Lost opportunities to share or contribute to the larger

community – Collections in a silo

Changing locations of important objects

Short-term storage limits

Striving to accomplish our mission: • CCCU

“To advance the cause of Christ-centered higher

education and to help our institutions transform lives

by faithfully relating scholarship and service to biblical

truth.”

• Bethel

“prepares graduates to serve in strategic capacities to

renew minds, live out biblical truth, transform culture,

and advance the gospel.”

If our intellectual objects are not widely

available then we are not accomplishing

our missions

For instance, no CCCU institutions are in

major registries of SHCH materials: • ROAR,

• OpenDOAR,

• WorldCat?

• WorldCat?

• This could be available full-text and is the case

in many institutions

If our mission is to steward the

information resources of our community

then we need to do better

It is crucial that we both: • Wisely and dependably steward our SHCH

resources

• Contribute them to the larger bodies of SHCH

materials

Not new themselves but new to smaller Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions

Institutional Repositories Digital Asset Management Digitization

• These three concepts contribute to the body of

SHCH items in complementary and sometimes overlapping ways

“Services and infrastructure surrounding digital

collections of the intellectual assets of an institution” Service examples: Permanent, durable location More easily searched and discovered Access control Better context for materials held in the IR Able to measure use of materials for a variety of

purposes (downloads/views)

Subset of Content Management

Grew out of broadcast and marketing industries

• Digital Assets are more complex: Need descriptive metadata; especially non-text items i.e.

audio, video, images

Intended for reuse

Rights must be managed

Library Difference • Most items are meant to be shared

Converting analog or physical items into a format that can be understood and used by computers • Large body of SHCH items that were never

digital but are still important pieces for research

• Some items are very fragile and unique need special treatment

some items may end up as the only instance of the item.

Both IT and Libraries steward digital information but there are some differences to note

• Scholarly, Historical and Cultural Objects are meant

to last a long time and are used in a wide variety of ways.

• Some objects are the only of their kind and need special care and consideration

• Priorities of sharing and protecting information

• Standards for interoperability and discovery

Subject Repositories • Physics - Arxiv.org

• Social Sciences - SSRN.com

Rise of Knowledge Management in 90’s

and maturity of Digital Asset

Management led institutions of Higher

Education to create their own

Varies by Institution but there are:

• Five Core Features

• Six Core Functions

Not just a storehouse of objects but a

service

Digital Content

Community driven & focused

Institutionally supported

Durable and permanent

Accessible Content

Gibbons, 2004

Material submission

Metadata application

Access Control

Discovery support

Distribution

Preservation

Gibbons, 2004

Worldwide

United States – 100+ by 2007, over 200 now in 2010

Must Understand the larger context • Require more context for scholarly purposes

• Require more context for preservation purposes

• Require more context in anticipation of distribution to broad location (global)

• Requires more context for reuse

Metadata!

Content Management System alone is not sufficient!

Scholarly Information is a niche

according to the business world

Software Options Open source

Dspace, Eprints, Fedora

Proprietary

Digital Commons, CONTENTdm

Platform Choice • Software features

• IT Department Support for Customization and

Software Upgrades

Open Source:

Dspace (partnered with Fedora in the DuraSpace organizaiton)

Fedora

Eprints

Proprietary:

Digital Commons by bepress

CONTENTdm by OCLC

DigiTool – by ExLibris (other ILS vendors have some modules like this)

Link to Dspace visual diagram of system

by Dynamic Diagrams

“Visualization shows how a repository is

built from individual content files,

organized into collections, and

made accessible to researchers”.

Storage Space

• Needed for preservation of digital materials

• Permanent location for dependable reference

Interoperability • Common Metadata Scheme – Dublin Core

Joint effort between Computer Scientists and Librarians

• Protocol for Sharing Between Systems – Open Archives Initiative

Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for

Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, and from the National Science Foundation (IIS-9817416 and IIS-0430906).

Conceptual Level for Systems • Open Archival Information System (OAIS)

Developed by NASA

Accepted as an ISO Standard in 2003

Optimized for Preservation and Access

At the individual institution level: • Make sure that we are doing all the items on the

cycle • Provide Digital Asset Management through an

Institutional Repository

• Establish a Digital Assets Committee

• Follow the Standards

• Share Cost and Maintenance Responsibilities

At the group level:

• NITLE provides a shared repository

The National Institute for Technology in Liberal

Education (NITLE) helps liberal arts colleges and

universities integrate inquiry, pedagogy, and

technology. With more than 140 liberal arts

institutions in its Network, NITLE works to enrich

undergraduate education and strengthen the liberal

arts tradition.

• Doesn’t this sound familiar?

Cross-campus team is necessary to track

and manage these assets.

Typical team consists of members of

Library,

Information Technology,

Instructional Technology,

Web Services,

Faculty

Example from Yale University: ODAI is charged with: developing a digital information management strategy building digital collections and build technical infrastructure in a

coordinated and collaborative manner across the entire campus. Programs include the development and deployment of: large-scale digital asset management systems, long-term preservation repositories for Yale digital content in all formats, cross-collection search capabilities to enable discovery of collections

hosted by numerous departments and many other innovative initiatives.

Recent Study in 2009 identified 50 Masters

& Baccalaureate Institutions with an

implementation

Implemented (holds a variety of items and available on the Web)

• Bethel University (MN) - CLIC

• Calvin College

• Northwestern College (MN) - CLIC

• Olivet Nazarene University

• Asbury Theological Seminary

• Baylor University

• Cedarville University through OHIOLink

• Mount Vernon Nazarene University through OHIOLink

not CCCU but of note: Hope College

Planning? Informal inquiry over listserv resulted in 10 institutions in the

planning process

Most instances in smaller institutions are

provided by some group effort:

• State Collaboration

• Mission-oriented collaboration

NITLE (Dspace)

LASR (Dspace)

• Regional Collaboration

CLIC (Contentdm)

HELIN (Digital Commons)

Because of teaching focus probably have

more student work than faculty work

Fulfill these needs that integrate with :

• “small but significant collections of locally valued

information resources, will have the aggregated

power to have an impact [on scholarly access and

preservation]” (Rogers-Urbanek, 2008)

• Best Example:

• Codex Sianaticus

http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/

Dspace @ MIT Digital Commons @ University of

Nebraska-Lincoln CONTENTdm @ Claremont Colleges

• Or Ball State

Bethel University Digital Library Calvin College Hekman Digital Archive

http://www.diigo.com/list/kgerber/

Brantley, P. (2008, March/April). Architectures for collaboration: Roles and expectations

for digital libraries. Educause Review, 43(2). Accessed May 28, 2010 from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/ArchitecturesforCollaborationR/162676

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Goodyear, M., & Fife, R. (2006, March/April). Institutional repositories: An opportunity for CIO campus impact. Educause Review 41(2). 10-11.

Markey, K., St. Jean, B., Soo, Y. R., Yakel, E., & Kim, J. (2008). Institutional repositories: The experience of master's and baccalaureate institutions. Portal: Libraries & the Academy, 8(2), 157-173.

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