We are exploring lots of options for digital asset management systems – right now, we are experimenting with a home-grown system, and while the backend seems ok so far, the interface needs major work. It’s clunky. The system also lacks capabilities for global find-and-replace, implementing controlled vocabularies, and easy data import/export. Also, folks with levels of expertise ranging from super-duper advanced to novice will be working on our projects, so we want to ensure some ease of use.

We’ve also been playing around with ContentDM, Omeka, and Fedora. There are aspects of all three that I really like and things that cause me some concern. (We’re excluding DSpace from the mix simply because it seems much more suitable for IRs and the like, but please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about that and you love using DSpace for image-based collections.)

So I come to you, my digital library pals – I’m sure you have strong opinions on these products. Do you have songs of praise to sing about any of them? Any huge warnings about what NOT to go with? We want to make sure we get as many perspectives as we can so we choose the right system for our needs.

Here’s where we need your help (and I was able to work in reference to the term “crowdsourcing”).

We need a name that makes it clear that we aren’t NC ECHO, the Digital Heritage Center, or NC State (all of which either are in some way related to the State Library or State Archives or have the words “North Carolina” and “State”  in their name). The name should (a) make reference to the Archives & Library or (b) be completely neutral (and I think that we prefer a “neutral”  name as it allows our partnerships to grow, potentially).  We’ll be providing access to the historic and contemporary records and publications of state government (as we do now), and the name needs to reflect that (probably).  These materials can be as diverse as the Library’s 2003 document about prosecuting computer crimes from the Department of Crime Control and Public Safety to the Archives’s Black Mountain College publications and promotional photographs from the Department of Tourism. And, we’re both divisions within the Department of Cultural Resources, so there is some question as to whether we need to work a reference to that in?

Now, I realize that a name containing all of this information would be ridiculous, but I’m providing this information to give you some background.

OK. Let the crowdsourcing begin…

For those of you who are using social media to promote your digital collections (and I assume that’s most of you at this point), is it working? What do your web stats tell you — do you notice a bump in traffic after a well-timed post or tweet? Do you hear from people who find your stuff via Facebook who might not have run across it otherwise? I don’t know that anybody has questioned the rush to interactive tools by libraries, and I’m certainly not now, but I know that we all have to budget our time carefully and maintaining an active online presence does require time. Now that we’re a few years into it and have enough experience to step back and take a good look, what do you think: is it worth it?

a) The vast majority of graduate-level library school students begin my class equating digitization with digital preservation. While digitization can be a component of digital preservation (e.g., film-to-video transfer), I think the vast majority of us would agree that this is not the case. I think many of us in the “digital field” assume that our colleagues in other areas of the library profession understand this, but I assert that this may not be the case. If the new crop of librarians coming through our programs don’t (and students at San Jose are as smart and savvy as students in on-site programs), it is fair to think that at least a few of our colleagues who have been working in reference, circulation, administrative, or other “non-digital” library roles for a few years may need a refresher.

Even WordPress knows it is wrong.

b) Many (OK, maybe it is only several, but it feels like many) of my students begin the course using the term “digitalization.” I suggest that if they are Canadian or British that I can understand why they might use it, but that they should stop. Immediately. Because those of us working in the field will (1) quit reading their resumes when we come to that word in their cover letter assuming that they don’t really know what they are talking about, or (2) snicker behind their backs when we hear them say it, and don’t take what they have to say seriously. Now, I realize that isn’t very nice to tell a newcomer to the field, but I look at it as tough love. If I’m honest with them now, I am sparing them the pain (and cost!) of rejection later.

c) They are amazed at how challenging digital preservation really is. Can’t I just save my files to a DVD/jump drive/hard drive/pick your media, and forget about it? Nope. I equate it to caring for a toddler. You *think* you can leave them alone for a few minutes while you wash the dishes and fold some laundry, but when you locate them again, they are typically covered in Playdoh(tm), finger paints, mud, soapy water, or all of the above. It’s the same with digital files. You think you can burn them to a CD or save them to your hard drive, graduate from school, get a new job, get married, and those files will be happily living on that media. And then. Disaster strikes. Files on the CD don’t open; your computer’s hard drive dies. Just like kids, you’ve got an ongoing responsibility and a lot of work ahead of you to ensure that they don’t just survive, but that they live long, safe, and “happy” lives.

While I may not be providing any dramatic or new insight into these issues, it is a good reminder to us all to remember how we talk about these issues and how patrons and librarians who are not as active in this aspect of our field think about them. It isn’t just about ensuring the longevity of our digital “stuff,” but it is also about making sure that people understand the hard work you do to make sure that their “stuff” is safe.

My two cents on this hot June day in North Carolina.

I know, silos are bad. Silos, well, they silo your content — putting it into boxes where it can’t get out and play with all that other data, running around the farm, rolling in the mud and grazing in the meadow and what have you — meaning you have to go to a bunch of individual silos to find all the things you need.

Okay, I can see how the thought of all of this free-love style of data management would be exciting. But from an administrative perspective non-silos (which would be what, heterogeneous piles of grain?) are a big headache. Here’s an example:

One of the projects I manage is an Institutional Repository. This repository has three major sources of content:

• the ETD submitted by graduating master’s and Ph.D. candidates
• faculty-created works (either previously published or not)
• and artworks created by the graduating seniors of the undergraduate School of Art and Design.

The repository was created to house the first two. The third was added as a kind of “happy accident”…

Now guess which one of three takes the most time, has the largest files, and requires upload, maintenance procedures, and user tools completely different from the others.

If you guessed it was our no-longer-happy accident, you’d be right. For this reason, I’m trying to make a case for starting a separate repository for these items. With a separate repository I can more easily ensure that the material is stored on Art School-provided servers, I can change the metadata schema and upload forms to suit their students, I can make the “look and feel” more attractive to the school. Most importantly, I can eventually hand off management of it to the School of Art.

However, I also have a sneaking suspicion that without really great tools for searching (and sorting) users will find this non-silos a pain too. Right now if I search in the IR for a term like “biological diversity” I get something like two faculty-authored works and 114 student artworks. Something tells me the researcher looking for Professor X’s groundbreaking work on mutant-genesis isn’t looking for a ceramic work by an ECU alum.

So what this leads me to believe is that silos should only be broken down for users if they are done the right way: with a useful filtering interface and good relevance algorithm. Some good examples? Many of the new wave of “discovery tools” for catalogs are great at this. Trove at the National Library of Australia is a fine example of a typical “digital collection” type. Another nice one is the Smithsonian Institution’s Collections Search Center. All take a variety of different data types, some from completely different repositories, and abandon the idea of a perfect algorithm in favor of letting the user tweak the results until they are just right.

After writing this, of course it seems kind dumb to even think I have to say it, but I see an increasing drumbeat to give up individual databases and searches in support of something monolithic but not particularly savvy. I guess I’d just like to keep up the impassioned defense of the little guy. The single, tailored resource, has its place. We should be striving to find a way to have it cooperate with the big guys, not morphing it into the big guys.

Develop a proposal to partner with at least one campus academic group outside the library for programming or project development opportunities, such as building a digital collection in an instructional setting, holding a research symposium, or developing digital humanities scholarship at Duke.

One of the groups with which we’d like to explore potential partnerships is HASTAC, which stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. HASTAC is based at Duke, but it prides itself on being a networked community of individuals and institutions; registration is open to any and all who are interested. Their 2010 free online conference, Grand Challenges and Global Innovations, will take place later this week, April 15-17.

Because of the growing interest in digital humanities on our campus, I’ve been thinking quite a bit on how our digital collections program could not only support, but also help to shape scholarship in this area. But, do libraries/archives and digital humanities projects approach digitization differently? Do we share the same goals? In libraries/archives, we strive for general accessibility and digital preservation of our resources without (too much) guessing about who the eventual researchers or what the eventual research projects might be. We place high value on implementing accepted standards for digitization and metadata. Do digital humanities projects start with a research agenda in mind? Do they craft the digitization and metadata standards to support that research agenda? What about long-term preservation and sustainability of those digitized resources? Which approaches do granting agencies favor? How can we work together to effectively achieve our goals?

The first two items seem intensely non-digital but they are the base for the stew.

New Leadership – Aug. 1 brought Stanley Wilder, our new University Librarian. Over the course of the last couple of months, Stanley has been giving a good look at Atkins Library digital presence and has begun to set us on a path of improvement, redesigning, restructuring, rethinking, re-imagining…things are just getting started, so stay tuned for follow up.

Anthropologist in the Library and Archives — along these lines Atkins now has a part-time anthropologist on staff who will begin to help us with user studies (of both physical and digital spaces) based on ethnographic designs. This piece began last week, so I don’t any comments right now but I am excited about an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how students, faculty, researchers interact with our digital environment(s).

Recruiting a Digital Programs Archivist — as a part of our re-thinking, etc. and given the current availability of position funding, we have decided to momentarily delay the recruitment of an A/V and Oral History Archivist position and instead pursue recruitment of a Digital Programs Archivist position (as of yet not advertised, but I will let everyone know when it opens). This is a major shift for us, signaling not only a continuation/expansion of the digital collections work we have done in the past (like New South Voices) but a concerted effort to build a broader, more formal program in digital preservation and program development. I am putting together the job description and requirements right now. It seems most important to me that the position emphasize an archival perspective on technology and a firm ability to manage workflows and communicate/collaborate with a broad constituency of “technologists” in the library, around the campus, and across the state….but all of this is in its infancy, so again, stay tuned.

Digital Humanities at UNC Charlotte — given limited financial and human resources, communication/collaboration with a broad constituency of “technologists” and with scholars is feeling like the way to go – even in our basic development of digital collections. I spent Friday in a symposium on digital humanities sponsored by our Center for Humanities, Technology, and Science (a center formed within the last couple of years). What I walked away with is an overwhelming sense of the need to be far more proactive in identifying scholar partners on campus with whom we can collaborate broadly to develop new digital collections employing new technologies for new kinds of humanistic studies. Clear as mud, right? OK, an example of this would be recent conversations I’ve had with a linguist on campus about evolving New South Voices into its next phase, which would include, among other things, more robust tools for linguistic analysis (thereby supporting her research and that of others). To take it a step further, it seems logical to take the idea to our Visualization Center and see where collaboration might benefit us all…and then maybe finding a partner in our Center for Applied Geographic Information Science . The possibilities are endless and potentially super complicated but I like this idea of getting some piece of our digital collections development out of our exclusive hands — of being a partner at the table that provides “the stuff” and a few levels of expertise that can collaborate with folks who can tell us how “the stuff” could “best” be used for research and with folks who have the technical expertise to take it way beyond what we’re capable of. In a way, it all seems so obvious but we have spent so much time partnering on a small scale or imagining our projects in a relative vacuum that this is also a game changing approach for us.

These are just a few of the larger pieces of the “digital stew” we’ve got cooking here at UNC Charlotte. I’ve rambled on enough for right now –perhaps proof I should be a more consistent contributor of smaller bits of information — but there are any number of questions that come up as I think about all of this and where it may take us.