Keywords
digital curation; library administration; digital asset management; library workflows; digital collections
Abstract
The BYU Library's cross-divisional Digital Content Exploratory Committee examined the extant personnel, systems, and workflows allocated to the care of a wide range of digital content types stewarded by the library (examples: digitized master and access derivative files, born-digital manuscript materials, born-digital scholarly materials, web archives, data, etc.). We compared our problems, standards, and staffing structures to the field at large through a literature review and an environmental scan. Our research has affirmed to us the unique and in many ways still-uncharted challenges and opportunities inherent to collecting, facilitating access to, and preserving digital content of research and historical value (a work we have, amongst ourselves and in our previous reports, referred to as “digital curation”). Our research has demonstrated the need to purposefully strategize digital curation on its own terms, separately from the plans made for the care of analog library materials. In this final report, we have created a general strategic statement and a set of guiding principles for the library, which we hope will inform administrators' future deliberations on digital curation issues. We then present specific, timely recommendations for staffing, systems, and workflows for the BYU Library administration to deliberate upon and enact as it sees fit. We make these recommendations with the goal of improving and futureproofing the library’s current digital curation practices. Our committee has unearthed a lot of potential improvements to make in the near term. We conclude with our attempts to see the future: sketching out a vision of potential challenges and opportunities yet to arise, which do not yet require administrative guidance, only awareness. We hope this report will help ensure that academic libraries have a robust infrastructure and a correctly aligned roadmap to successfully steward digital content for the foreseeable future.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Memory, Lindsey; Wiederhold, Rebecca A.; Nimer, Cory L.; Skeem, Dainan; Brownell, David; Wiser, Jamie E.; Lewis, Nicole; Robbins, Paul K.J.; Alvord, Trevor; and Thorsted, Tyler, "BYU Library Digital Content Exploratory Committee Final Report" (2024). Harold B. Lee Library Faculty Publications. 1.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/library_facpub/1
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024-06-17
College
Harold B. Lee Library
Included in
Archival Science Commons, Cataloging and Metadata Commons, Collection Development and Management Commons, Scholarly Communication Commons