Perspectives on preservation strategies for digital content: Lessons learned

Abstract

This panel will discuss Texas Tech University Digital Library’s experiences with preservation in the past eight years including failures and near-misses that caused TTU to seek a better system. This all-encompassing system influences all processes of digitization from scanning, metadata creation, online display, and to long term storage maintenance.

Discussion will include how we created policies and procedures for handling a variety of materials (including scanning resolution and file type) and a file naming system and folder structure. Other topics will include: balancing work on new collections while correcting older collection, managing a growing digital preservation system when few understand what you are doing or why, reaching out to the university community about preservation needs, and staying a step ahead of our current technology to ensure that we make fully informed preservation and migration decisions.

The panel will be comprised of two librarians who were a part of the creation of the TTU Digital Library, two who were hired at the mid-point, and two recent hires; thus, giving varied perspectives on the collections and preservation issues. The panel will be in a “talk-show” format with prepared questions and discussions, and then opened for questions from the audience.

Description

The panel presentation was presented at 2013 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries. This group of librarians decided that a traditional panel presentation of each person reading from a prepared paper would not accurately reflect the nature of digital preservation—a collective effort that requires flexibility and pluck from all involved, each bringing their own experiences and strengths. As such, we opted for a format where the moderator would ask questions and play off the answers to link concepts of preservation together. We did not prepare slides that would distract from the frank conversation. Our handout is included after the transcript of our panel. The panel was standing room only and well received.

Keywords

Digital libraries, Digital preservation, Texas Tech University, Texas Digital Library

Citation

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