Response

Meister – Question 1

By Sam Meister
June 2013

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1How is data curation a part of your job?

Sam Meister

Digital Archivist and Assistant Professor, Mansfield Library – University of Montana

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1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 As Digital Archivist, my main responsibilities and most immediate priorities concern the management of born-digital materials acquired in archival collections. Over the past year, I have focused on building a foundation of policies, procedures, and workflows to guide the process of acquiring digital materials from donors and establishing initial administrative, physical, and intellectual control over these materials. I have drawn from the final report of the AIMS – Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship project,1 which has come up with a framework to assist current practitioners in designing and implementing policies and workflows to acquire, process, preserve, and provide access to born-digital materials. I have created local implementations of the methods and documents outlined in the AIMS report, including a donor survey instrument to collect important contextual information during the acquisition process. I have also implemented digital forensics hardware and software tools to help maintain the authenticity and integrity of digital materials when transferring them from the donor to the archives.

2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Another resource I have used to guide my work is the Digital Curation Centre’s Curation Lifecycle Model, which is a visual representation of a “high level overview of the stages required for successful curation and preservation of data from initial conceptualisation through the iterative curation cycle.”2 In relation to actions within the Curation Lifecycle Model, most of my recent data curation activities fall within creating or receiving data, appraising and selecting data, ingesting data, and preserving data. The conceptual framework articulated in this model has informed my workflow design activities, where I have attempted to ensure that discrete actions are logically integrated into an overall comprehensive system for managing born-digital materials.

3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 While my main focus has been on the curation of born-digital materials within hybrid archival collections, this is a foundational element of a comprehensive program to guide the long-term preservation and access to all the digital content that the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library produces and acquires. As Digital Archivist in a medium-sized academic library, I am in an excellent position to lead a collaborative effort to develop and implement a sustainable digital preservation program. Having established policies, procedures, and workflows within the Archives and Special Collections department, in the coming months I will be shifting my data curation activities towards organization-wide tasks. These activities will include the development and implementation of a digital preservation policy framework and technological infrastructure to support ongoing preservation and access services.

4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 In my particular organizational context, I am the champion for ensuring that preservation actions are integrated into the workflows of the multiple content streams that are currently part of Library services. This includes helping to revise our digitization workflows and policies to ensure that digital objects are created according to standards and best practices and incorporating the capture and management of metadata needed to ensure current and future access. In addition, I am participating in the development of a Library-managed institutional repository service, a new direction and new content stream for the Library. In a similar manner, my contribution to this project involves ensuring that the preservation and access needs of users are integrated into the design and functions of the hardware and software that underlies this new service.

  1. 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0
  2. AIMS Work Group, “AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship,” 2012, accessed January 8, 2013, http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/whitepaper/AIMS_final.pdf. []
  3. “What is the Digital Curation Lifecycle Model,” Digital Curation Centre, accessed February 12, 2013, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/digital-curation/digital-curation-faqs/dcc-curation-lifecycle-model. []

Sam Meister

Digital Archivist and Assistant Professor, Mansfield Library – University of Montana

  • Sam's Responses:
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

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