I tend to try out roundtables and sections each year and while I have my favorites, I like to go to new ones too. Yesterday I explored the Research Libraries Roundtable. As a staff member at an ARL library, I was interested in hearing about projects going on at similar organizations. Ricky Erway from OCLC kicked things off and shared details of a recent report, titled Walk this Way: Detailed Steps for Transferring Born- Digital Content from Media You can Read In-House. Although I hadn’t read the report I found Ricky’s comments very helpful. We haven’t gotten too far with thinking about managing born digital records at my institution, but it seems as a profession, we’re getting much closer to some tangible and manageable solutions. For example, one of the first steps the report recommends is to take an inventory or survey of existing born digital content. Then prioritize the inventory to be sure you’re dealing with the most important content first. The final step is to decide which materials can be migrated in house.
Most exciting, were some of the next steps that Ricky shared with us, including developing services at larger institutions that will reformat born digital content for other institutions that don’t have the resources and equipment to deal with funkier formats.
Seth Shaw spoke next and shared his experiences working at Duke University. The biggest take away from his comments for me was the need to establish a streamlined and automated workflow for staff, especially for those who don’t work wi born digital that often. A streamlined approach saves time overall because you’re not constantly retraining staff. As he outlined for us where Duke was when he started there in 2007 and where they are now, he emphasized something that we often forget when talking about born digital content: “We can get better” over time. Christie Peterson, Naomi Nelson and Erin O’Meara spoke about the need to speak across divisional or units within the organization to clearly explain our needs for storage and security.
A common theme during these presentations and our discussion was the issue of trust, both within and across institutions. Ricky Erway shared that she hasn’t found institutions ready to send there content to another site to be reformatted. There are certainly legal issues to consider when sending materials out, but I wonder if at the root of this inaction is a sense among practitioners that we’ll be judged by our peers.
I’d love to hear what others think about establishing and building trust in our profession!
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