Hope everyone enjoyed the Midwinter meeting! Below is a recap of the presentations. A big thank you to Shawn Averkamp for moderating the meeting and taking such fantastic notes!
Michelle Reilly, Head of Digital Services, University of Houston Libraries spoke about how she developed a simple strategy for collecting and archiving born digital materials. She drew on familiar and easily accessible tools like email and page2rss to capture and gather the materials and then converted all documents to a single file format (PDF). She then organized materials into categories and developed appropriate workflows for each. Reilly worked with the archivist to document collection development decisions (e.g., how deep to go into embedded links?), file naming conventions, and task lists (i.e., who does what and when). Reilly currently applies metadata, wraps in METS, and performs checksums herself, but she is looking towards improving the workflow and providing access to the materials (they are currently just collecting, not storing in a repository).
Ann Marie Willer, Preservation Librarian, MIT Libraries, and Nick Szydlowski, IMLS Preservation Administration Fellow, NYPL, gave a brief report on an assessment project they undertook at MIT Libraries on the preservation status of the Libraries' ejournal holdings. They based the study on the PEPRS project, which produced the Keepers Registry [1]. The goal was to see how many of the Libraries' 45,765 ejournal holdings were represented in the 4 major repositories: Portico, Hathi, CLOCKSS, and JSTOR. The found that for ejournals acquired through aggregators, only 22% had a match in one of the repos, while ejournals leased by title had a 72% match. Some of the outcomes of this study were reports and tools that staff in other library departments can use when negotiating with publishers and data they will submit for an RFI on Open Access articles by MIT researchers. They also found this project to be a opportunity to work cross-departmentally, especially with their selectors, who expressed interest in helping put the pressure on publishers who did not archive their ejournals in preservation repositories.
Patricia Galloway, Professor at SLIS, UT-Austin, discussed the work of graduate students in her Problems in the Permanent Retention of Electronic Records course. Galloway stressed the need for digital archivists to know the materials, so she has emphasized a hands-on component of her class. Each class works together on preserving complex materials, such as email attachments, multimedia tutorials, and video games. Students learn approaches to novel problems, like how to assess significant properties for complex formats, but they also gain practical experience in developing preservation infrastructure--working with DSpace and creating succession plans for stewardship of the materials they've preserved.
[1] http://thekeepers.org/thekeepers/keepers.asp" href="http://thekeepers.org/thekeepers/keepers.asp" target="_blank"> http://thekeepers.org/thekeepers/keepers.asp