Collaborative development of born-digital archives to facilitate discovery | DCDC14

If together we build it they will comeToward 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

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

Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities | 29 October 2014 | 2

Academic library trends and collaborations

Print to digital


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

Personal libraries


Books/e-books

Web resources

Music/film

Journals/e-journals

Grey literature

Owning to renting


ElsevierWiley

Sage

Jisc Collections

Netflix

Shift to the network level


Resources

ERM

Discovery

Subject guides

Reading listsLibrary management systems

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?


Network benefits


Practical benefit- Delivering morevalue locally

Economic benefit- Scaling up delivery

Technical benefit- Concentrated development

Born-digital archive

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


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


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


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


Collaboration – to be or not to be?

Collaboration – to be or not to be?

• Waiting for someone else to open Pandora’s box and find an answer


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


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)


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!


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)


Collaboration – to be?

Archive collaboration works well for

• Definable projects and outputs (egdigitisation, disaster reaction)

• Lead organisation and other contributors share technical and strategic objectives (TNA and A2A, OCLC and RLUK research projects)


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?


Finding next steps

• Contact us to be involved in further discussions

• Propose to set up a Google Group

• [email protected]

• [email protected]


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Thank you

Collaborative development of born-digital archives to facilitate discovery | DCDC14

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