Katherine Skinner

Library-as-Publisher: Capacity Building for the Library Publishing Subfield

The role of publisher is increasingly assumed by academic and research libraries, usually inspired by campus-based demands for digital publishing platforms to support e-journals, conference proceedings, technical reports, and database-driven websites. Although publishing is compatible with librarians’ traditional strengths, there are additional skill sets that library publishers must master in order to provide robust publishing services to their academic communities.

Economics, sustainability, and the cooperative model in digital preservation

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the emerging field of digital preservation and its economics. It seeks to consider in detail the cooperative model and the path it provides toward sustainability as well as how it fosters participation by cultural memory organizations and their administrators, who are concerned about what digital preservation will ultimately cost and who will pay.Design/methodology/approach – The authors cast light on the decisions that administrators of cultural memory organizations are making on a daily basis – namely, to preserve or not to preserve their digital collections. They assert that either way, a decision is being made, costs are incurred, and consequences are being levied. The authors begin by exploring the costs incurred by cultural memory organizations if they do not quickly establish digital preservation programs for their digital assets. They move then to look to the digital preservation fields preliminary findings regarding the costs of preserving digital assets and ...

Chronicles in preservation: preserving digital news and newspapers

Abstract Since the mid-1990s, libraries and archives have been digitizing newspapers for preservation and access. The standards used for this work have evolved significantly. Today’s collections employ digitization, metadata extraction and standards, and file formats that are different from those used for early collections. Increasingly, libraries and archives also include borndigital material. Given the importance of newspapers as primary documents of history, libraries and archives must preserve their digitized and born-digital collections carefully. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)1 has funded the Chronicles in Preservation project to study the preservation readiness of digital newspaper collections. Led by the Educopia Institute (www.educopia.org), the project has brought together seven academic libraries in the U.S. and three distributed digital preservation (DDP) systems-MetaArchive, Chronopolis, and the University of North Texas’s Coda repository. These partners are accomplishing a range of activities. First, they investigated community standards, specifications, and practices for digital newspaper collections and distilled this information into a set of Guidelines for Digital Newspaper Preservation Readiness. Second, they exported collections from libraries and ingested them into the DDP systems, documenting these test exchanges in a Comparative Anaysis of Distributed Digital Frameworks. Finally, the project is augmenting a set of existing digital preservation tools to simplify the packaging and exchange of digital newspaper collections. This paper provides a walkthrough of the structure and contents of the Guidelines for Preservation Readiness of Digital Newspapers, shares the evaluative metrics for the Comparative Analysis of Distributed Digital Preservation Frameworks, and discusses the implementations of the interoperability tools.

Moving the Needle: From Innovation to Impact

The digital library has been on a seemingly insatiable quest for “innovation” for decades. This focus permeates our field, usually in the guise of transforming digital library practices. The themes change over time (e.g., Federating library collections! Digital humanities! Digital preservation! Big data!), but dependably, digital library research projects on “innovation” topics are seeded in abundance each year. Researchers are rewarded (and funded) for their big, experimental ideas, not for successful applications of innovations in practice. Gearing resources toward “innovation” alone prizes the unique or novel approach above the cultivation of our field. Few innovations ever flower and thrive beyond their initial moments in the sun. What might happen if digital libraries shift their focus from the innovative solution to the process of using innovations within networks to actively facilitate system-wide change? Drawing from the disciplines of sociology and economics, Skinner will explore both established and emergent models for system-wide transformation, ultimately asking what digital libraries could accomplish as a field if we shifted our focus from “innovation” to “impact.”

Organizational Strategies for Cultural Heritage Preservation

Cultural Heritage content is increasingly being both created digitally and digitized. Preserving this content has been a much discussed and debated question in the Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities communities. Many concerns that have been raised around the organizational challenges. Centralized preservation is often praised for unified access and consistency, but at the same are criticized for their reliance on the continued interest of a smaller number of maintainers. Alternatively, decentralized preservation leads to better longevity but often at a cost of consistency or ease of access. Beyond this question, there are many other organizational issues. Such as the role of states and commercial entities in preservation; and, dealing with concerns about ownership, privacy and acceptable use of materials. This panel will discuss these issues with the goal of finding a balance between these often conflicting approaches.

Chronicles in preservation project

The Educopia Institute, with the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the libraries of University of North Texas, Penn State, Virginia Tech, University of Utah, Georgia Tech, Boston College, and Clemson University, have received

Improving and strengthening inter-institutional preservation

300,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study, document, and model the use of data preparation and distributed digital preservation frameworks to collaboratively preserve digitized and born-digital newspaper collections.

Metaarchive/lockss distributed preservation networks

Large-scale digital preservation is increasingly viewed as a core technology need in the scientific and academic communities. Indeed, the vast majority of the worlds information is now produced as digital files, not print documents. If we do not take the time to preserve this information it will be lost, and along with it significant scientific and cultural resources will vanish. This is not an imaginary or theoretical threat: every day events occur which result in the loss of data collections. These events range from the smallest and most mundane to the catastrophic, and they cannot be totally prevented -- indeed they are in many ways inherent in any large technology enterprise. Our job is to protect important data in the face of these events, preserving it for future scientists, researchers, students, and society at large.

New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation

The Workshop will provide information and training for institutions seeking to build or join LOCKSS-based distributed digital preservation networks. Such Private LOCKSS Networks (PLNs) enable groups of institutions to establish collaborative partnerships to securely preserve collections. Instructors will address the technical implementation as well as important organizational and legal elements of distributed digital preservation. Attendees will gain an understanding of how to produce and manage a private LOCKSS network.