1. Stewarding Your Institution’s
Scholarly, Historical, and Cultural
Heritage (SHCH)
June 4, 2010
Kent Gerber
Digital Library Manager,
Bethel University

2.  Harness and apply our institution’s
internal knowledge assets
• Broaden their reach
• Extend their value
• Actively steward them through the whole Digital
Lifecycle

3.  Each College and University is a rich source of
valuable intellectual content in digital and
analog form.
• Theses & Dissertations
• Faculty Work
• Institutional & Departmental Publications
• Symposia
• Lectures and Community Events
• Art Galleries and Special Collections
• Teaching Resources
• Images for Teaching and Research
• Data Sets

4.  Facing a digital dark age
• Easier personal storage allowed anyone to save
their materials but important objects are being
lost to:
 Community member attrition
 Technological obsolescence
 Lost opportunities to share or contribute to the larger
community – Collections in a silo
 Changing locations of important objects
 Short-term storage limits

5.  Striving to accomplish our mission:
• CCCU
 “To advance the cause of Christ-centered higher
education and to help our institutions transform lives
by faithfully relating scholarship and service to biblical
truth.”
• Bethel
 “prepares graduates to serve in strategic capacities to
renew minds, live out biblical truth, transform culture,
and advance the gospel.”

6.  Ifour intellectual objects are not widely
available then we are not accomplishing
our missions
 Forinstance, no CCCU institutions are in
major registries of SHCH materials:
• ROAR,
• OpenDOAR,
• WorldCat?

7. • WorldCat?
• This could be available full-text and is the case
in many institutions

8.  Ifour mission is to steward the
information resources of our community
then we need to do better
 It is crucial that we both:
• Wisely and dependably steward our SHCH
resources
• Contribute them to the larger bodies of SHCH
materials

9.  Not
new themselves but new to smaller
Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions
 InstitutionalRepositories
 Digital Asset Management
 Digitization
• These three concepts contribute to the body of
SHCH items in complementary and sometimes
overlapping ways

10. “Services and infrastructure surrounding digital
collections of the intellectual assets of an institution”
Service examples:
 Permanent, durable location
 More easily searched and discovered
 Access control
 Better context for materials held in the IR
 Able to measure use of materials for a variety of
purposes (downloads/views)

11.  Subset of Content Management
 Grew out of broadcast and marketing
industries
• Digital Assets are more complex:
 Need descriptive metadata; especially non-text items i.e.
audio, video, images
 Intended for reuse
 Rights must be managed
 Library Difference
• Most items are meant to be shared

12.  Converting analog or physical items into
a format that can be understood and used
by computers
• Large body of SHCH items that were never
digital but are still important pieces for research
• Some items are very fragile and unique
 need special treatment
 some items may end up as the only instance of the
item.

13.  BothIT and Libraries steward digital
information but there are some differences
to note
• Scholarly, Historical and Cultural Objects are meant
to last a long time and are used in a wide variety of
ways.
• Some objects are the only of their kind and need
special care and consideration
• Priorities of sharing and protecting information
• Standards for interoperability and discovery

14.  Subject Repositories
• Physics - Arxiv.org
• Social Sciences - SSRN.com
 Rise
of Knowledge Management in 90’s
and maturity of Digital Asset
Management led institutions of Higher
Education to create their own

15.  Varies by Institution but there are:
• Five Core Features
• Six Core Functions
 Notjust a storehouse of objects but a
service

16.  Digital Content
 Community driven & focused
 Institutionally supported
 Durable and permanent
 Accessible Content
Gibbons, 2004

17.  Material submission
 Metadata application
 Access Control
 Discovery support
 Distribution
 Preservation
Gibbons, 2004

18. Worldwide

19. United States – 100+ by 2007, over 200 now in 2010

20.  Must Understand the larger context
• Require more context for scholarly purposes
• Require more context for preservation purposes
• Require more context in anticipation of
distribution to broad location (global)
• Requires more context for reuse
 Metadata!
Content Management System alone is not
sufficient!

21.  Scholarly
Information is a niche
according to the business world

22.  Software Options
 Open source
 Dspace, Eprints, Fedora
 Proprietary
 Digital Commons, CONTENTdm

23.  Platform Choice
• Software features
• IT Department Support for Customization and
Software Upgrades

24. Open Source:
Dspace (partnered with Fedora in the DuraSpace
organizaiton)
Fedora
Eprints
Proprietary:
Digital Commons by bepress
CONTENTdm by OCLC
DigiTool – by ExLibris (other ILS vendors have some
modules like this)

25.  Link
to Dspace visual diagram of system
by Dynamic Diagrams
 “Visualizationshows how a repository is
built from individual content files,
organized into collections, and
made accessible to researchers”.

26.  Storage Space
• Needed for preservation of digital materials
• Permanent location for dependable reference

27.  Interoperability
• Common Metadata Scheme – Dublin Core
 Joint effort between Computer Scientists and Librarians
• Protocol for Sharing Between Systems – Open
Archives Initiative
 Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for
Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, and from
the National Science Foundation (IIS-9817416 and IIS-0430906).

28.  Conceptual Level for Systems
• Open Archival Information System (OAIS)
 Developed by NASA
 Accepted as an ISO Standard in 2003
 Optimized for Preservation and Access

30.  At the individual institution level:
• Make sure that we are doing all the items on the
cycle
• Provide Digital Asset Management through an
Institutional Repository
• Establish a Digital Assets Committee
• Follow the Standards
• Share Cost and Maintenance Responsibilities

31.  At the group level:
• NITLE provides a shared repository
 The National Institute for Technology in Liberal
Education (NITLE) helps liberal arts colleges and
universities integrate inquiry, pedagogy, and
technology. With more than 140 liberal arts
institutions in its Network, NITLE works to enrich
undergraduate education and strengthen the liberal
arts tradition.
• Doesn’t this sound familiar?

32.  Cross-campus team is necessary to track
and manage these assets.
 Typical team consists of members of
Library,
Information Technology,
Instructional Technology,
Web Services,
Faculty

33.  Example from Yale University:
ODAI is charged with:
developing a digital information management strategy
building digital collections and build technical infrastructure in a
coordinated and collaborative manner across the entire campus.
Programs include the development and deployment of:
large-scale digital asset management systems,
long-term preservation repositories for Yale digital content in all formats,
cross-collection search capabilities to enable discovery of collections
hosted by numerous departments and many other innovative initiatives.

34. Recent Study in 2009 identified 50 Masters
& Baccalaureate Institutions with an
implementation

35.  Implemented (holds a variety of items and available on the
Web)
• Bethel University (MN) - CLIC
• Calvin College
• Northwestern College (MN) - CLIC
• Olivet Nazarene University
• Asbury Theological Seminary
• Baylor University
• Cedarville University through OHIOLink
• Mount Vernon Nazarene University through OHIOLink
not CCCU but of note: Hope College
 Planning?
Informal inquiry over listserv resulted in 10 institutions in the
planning process

36.  Mostinstances in smaller institutions are
provided by some group effort:
• State Collaboration
• Mission-oriented collaboration
 NITLE (Dspace)
 LASR (Dspace)
• Regional Collaboration
 CLIC (Contentdm)
 HELIN (Digital Commons)

37.  Becauseof teaching focus probably have
more student work than faculty work

38.  Fulfill these needs that integrate with :
• “small but significant collections of locally valued
information resources, will have the aggregated
power to have an impact [on scholarly access and
preservation]” (Rogers-Urbanek, 2008)
• Best Example:
• Codex Sianaticus
 http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/

39.  Dspace @ MIT
 Digital Commons @ University of
Nebraska-Lincoln
 CONTENTdm @ Claremont Colleges
• Or Ball State
 Bethel University Digital Library
 Calvin College Hekman Digital Archive
 http://www.diigo.com/list/kgerber/

40.  Brantley, P. (2008, March/April). Architectures for collaboration: Roles and expectations
for digital libraries. Educause Review, 43(2). Accessed May 28, 2010 from
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/
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