Tyler O. Walters

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 ...

The new frontier of institutional repositories: A common destination with different paths1

Since the Fall 2002 ARL/CNI/SPARC workshop on digital institutional repositories, many research libraries have considered whether institutional repositories are feasible for their institutions. Though institutional repositories offer great possibilities, associated technical and policy challenges can be intimidating, especially for institutions devoting limited resources to an institutional repository. This paper presents the experiences of three different ARL (Association of Research Libraries) member libraries who wanted to exploit the opportunities offered by institutional repositories. These libraries at Florida State University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and the Georgia Institute of Technology differed in their motivations, the resources that were available within their respective institutions, and the strategies they employed for defining, scoping and implementing repositories. Their accounts of the journey to a shared destination illustrate how varied the surrounding landscapes and selected paths can become.

Improving and strengthening inter-institutional preservation

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.

Metaarchive/lockss distributed preservation networks

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.