On Institutional Repositories and Cornfields (they don’t end)

Harrison Inefuku is Iowa State University Library’s new Digital Repository Coordinator.  While Harrison is not part of the Preservation Department, he works closely with us on digital preservation issues, and has agreed to be an occasional guest blogger.

As Hilary mentioned in an earlier post, I left hot and humid Hawai‘i for what turned out to be an even hotter and more humid Iowa. I’ve already been asked on multiple occasions, “What could draw someone from the white, sandy beaches of O‘ahu to the exotic climes of central Iowa?”

The opportunity to serve as Iowa State University’s first Digital Repository Coordinator, of course! And, despite my aversion to heat and humidity, I am thoroughly enjoying my time here.

In my role as digital repository coordinator, I am overseeing the development and operations of Digital Repository @ Iowa State University, Iowa State’s new institutional repository. An institutional repository is a platform for collecting and providing access to scholarly, research and creative works being produced by members of the Iowa State community—our faculty, staff, students, administrators and university offices, programs, centers and departments.

There isn’t much in the repository yet. I’ve spent much of my first two months here developing the administrative framework of the repository—writing the policies, guidelines and procedures that will determine how the repository functions. Many of the recent theses and dissertations written by now-Iowa State alumni are available, as well as many publications written by library faculty and staff. Try doing a search on your favorite Parks Library Preservation blog writers and see if anything comes up!

Of course, when we provide access to digital materials, we want to ensure that these materials remain accessible over time. This is where my close working relationship with the Preservation Department comes in. Together, with the Preservation and Special Collections departments, we need to develop strategies for digital preservation to ensure that the scholarly and creative output of Iowa State is preserved for posterity.

The vast majority of information created today is born-digital and, in increasing numbers, exists in digital format only.  In the digital environment, it is easy to lose information—through changes in technology, the ease of manipulating digital files, and the tendency for files to corrupt right when you need them. Preservation is further complicated by copyright law, which places limitations on how and why libraries can make reproductions of the materials in their collections.

My approach to digital preservation draws from archival science and diplomatics (the study of archival documents), so in addition to ensuring ongoing access to our digital collections, I am concerned with their authenticity and reliability. In future guest blog posts, I intend to touch on a myriad of topics relating to digital preservation, including a discussion of diplomatics and the authenticity of records.  I think Parks Library Preservation is going to quickly regret inviting me to be a guest blogger.

Stay tuned, everyone!

A hui hou,

Harrison

 

1091 Project: Digitization and Conservation

This latest installment of the 1091 Project, a collaboration with Preservation Underground, the Duke University Libraries Conservation blog, addresses the relationship between digitization and conservation at our respective institutions.

Last year, I wrote a post about some of the philosophical issues surrounding the digitization and conservation of historical materials.  Today, I’ll address the practical issues of negotiating this relationship within our institution.

At Iowa State University Library, the Digital Initiatives unit is part of the Preservation Department, along with the Conservation unit, and the Preservation Services unit (Binding, Mass Deacidification, Reformatting, and Marking).  Having Digitial Initiatives and Conservation in one department under one supervisor makes it easy to foster a close working relationship.  When Digital Initiatives first started, it operated as its own independent unit in the Research & Access division of the Library.  Organizational restructuring in 2008 provided an opportunity to move the unit into the Preservation Department.

Locating Digital Initiatives in the Preservation Department has proved to be a strong stewardship decision for the Library.  I’m not suggesting this is the only organizational plan that promotes good stewardship, simply that this decision proved to be highly effective for our institution.  From a physical stewardship perspective, materials which travel to and from Special Collections & Archives for digitization never bypass preservation.  The materials are assessed (and sometimes treated) before digitization, and they are examined (and sometimes treated) after digitization.  From a digital stewardship perspective, Digital Initiative operates with a full understanding of digital preservation issues, and is able to stay current with best practices in this quickly-changing specialty.

The Digital workflow comes mainly from Special Collections & Archives.  Materials travel from Special Collections & Archives to the Conservation Lab, where they are quickly assessed for stability.  Stable materials are sent on to Digital Initiatives for digitization, and a streamer traveling with the materials indicates whether they will need to return to Conservation for post-digitization stabilization, treatment, and/or rehousing, or whether they can return directly to Special Collections.  Should any mishap occur during handling (an extremely rare occurrence), then Digital Initiatives staff know to send the materials back through Conservation post-digitization.

The Conservation workflow for materials to be digitized is often split between pre-digitization and post-digitization materials.  Treatments that are required for safe handling of the materials are prioritized in an effort to get them to Digital as expediently as possible.  Materials returning from digitization on their way back to Special Collections & Archives receive a secondary priority status, since researchers will have access to the digital surrogates as soon as the metadata is completed.  Conservation and Digital Initiatives communicate frequently and adjust their priorities in order to accommodate one another’s workflows.  Sharing a supervisor allows the two units to balance occasionally differing priorities with minimal difficulty.

Pre-digitization treatments include dry cleaning, humidification and flattening, and mending (when required for stabilization), and disbinding when necessary.  Post-digitization treatments include more complex mends, rebinding when necessary, and rehousings.  Of course, this is a generalization of our procedures, and more detailed treatment decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.

Staff from Digital Initiatives, Special Collections & Archives, and Conservation hold regular monthly meetings to discuss the current workflow, plan for upcoming projects, and troubleshoot.  Starting next month, our new Digital Repository Coordinator will be joining these monthly meetings.  He will be building and managing our digital institutional repository (its own unit in the Library’s Research & Access division), so it will be interesting to see how our intra- and interdepartmental relationships continue to evolve!

Duke University Libraries structure their digitization and conservation efforts differently; let’s head over to Preservation Underground and see how they make it work.

 

Aloha Harrison!

All the way from Honolulu, Hawaii, and various points along the way, Harrison Inefuku has joined the ISU Library as our first Digital Repository Coordinator. Harrison will be in charge of our institutional repository through Digital Commons, where we hope to provide open access (no-cost, online access to scholarly research results that are free of most copyright and licensing restrictions) to our electronic theses and dissertations, publications from our faculty, gray materials produced by departments and centers on campus, and much, much more. He will also work very closely with Digital Collections, help establish digital preservation policies, and develop our electronic records management program.

Harrison has a dual BFA in Graphic Design and BA in Visual Culture from the University of the Pacific, and a dual Master’s degree from the University of British Columbia in Archival Studies, and Library and Information Studies.  It sounds like he needs a dual position here as well–we’ve got plenty of ideas and we certainly don’t want him getting bored!

After graduate school, Harrison was an ARL Fellow at the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health, where he developed a set of preservation workflows for electronic records acquired by NLM’s Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program. Just before joining us here, he worked on an InterPARES 3 Project “Digital Records Forensics Project and University Institutional Repositories: Copyright and Long-Term Preservation Project.”

Even though he is so early in his career, Harrison has already given a number of presentations and poster sessions on institutional repositories at national conferences. So look for him at ALA, SAA, and other conferences in the near future.

We are excited to get our institutional repository off the ground and to work with Harrison. We will have him share his experiences with you, here, on the blog.  So far, his adventures revolve around life in Ames, Iowa: he was relieved to find that Spam is cheap. We’ve got him roped in; he thinks everything is on sale, all of the time. Ah, the joys of living in the Midwest.

 

Position Available: ISU Library Seeks Digital Repository Coordinator

The Iowa State University (ISU) Library invites applications and nominations for a new position, the Digital Repository Coordinator. This individual will oversee the creation and management of a campus-wide Digital Repository for ISU, to be administered by the University Library. The Digital Repository will eventually include scholarly and creative works, research, publications, and reports contributed by faculty, students, staff, and administrative units, as well as special, thematic, and multi-media collections from the Library and the University Archives. Platforms supporting the Digital Repository will include bepress and CONTENTdm. This position reports to the Library’s Associate Dean for Research & Access.

The successful candidate will have demonstrable analytical, organizational, planning, and project management skills. Ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a rapidly changing environment. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, both oral and written. Ability to interact effectively with audiences of diverse technological backgrounds.

To ensure consideration, applications must be submitted by December 28, 2011. 

For the full job posting and application instructions, please click here.

 

From Lennox Intern to Zipf Fellow

One of our former Lennox Interns, Kathleen Fear 2008, has received the A. R. Zipf Fellowship in Information Management for 2011.  She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information at the University of Michigan where she also received her MSI with a specialization in preservation of information, and has a bachelors degree in physics from Yale University.  We are all proud or and excited for Kathleen.  Below is her description of her research project on preserving data.

Kathleen Fear, 2008 Lennox Intern and 2011 Zipf Fellow

As an archivist with a scientific background, I am interested in the management of research data, especially how to create archives and repositories that enable easy retrieval and reuse of data. Scientific data is incredibly valuable, and much of it is unique, difficult or expensive to reproduce. While there is increasing recognition of this fact and interest in creating repositories to capture and preserve data, there is much less research into how those repositories can support meaningful reuse. Beyond retaining the ability to read or render data, repositories must provide enough (and appropriate) metadata to allow potential reusers to find data that suits their needs and, further, to understand the data and its context. My research interests center on identifying user needs for metadata for finding and selecting research data for reuse.

This area of interest arose for me in part actually because of my internship at ISU. While discussing how to best catalog digitized images from the ISU collections, an important question that came up was what metadata users would actually need to be able to retrieve and use those images. Should they be cataloged to print standards – or were those kinds of records too cumbersome for users and too time-consuming for the catalogers? Should they just be tagged, flickr-style, or does that result in low-quality, unhelpful records? We didn’t know the answer, and it didn’t seem like there was an answer ‘out there,’ or at least not one grounded in solid research on users. When I returned to U-M after my internship, I turned this problem into the central question for my master’s thesis – and it’s remained basically the focus of my research ever since.

A major contribution of my work (…I hope) is to inform efforts to build repositories for research data that actively support researchers in finding and reusing or repurposing data. By better understanding what information researchers need available to them as metadata for reuse, data managers could more effectively guide researchers in documenting their data and in building databases or repositories for individual projects that could then more easily be integrated into disciplinary or institutional repositories for long-term preservation.