AIDA: call for volunteers

How safe are your digital assets? Do you think you know all about your
digital assets? Would you like to understand more about how to improve
digital asset management in your organisation?

ULCC are currently leading a project (sponsored by JISC) called Assessing
Institutional Digital Assets, or AIDA. We’re looking for institutions in the
HFE sector in the United Kingdom who would like to help us, by participating
as a case study for this project.

The idea is that you would complete a guided self-assessment task which we
hope will make things clearer in relation to you and your digital assets. We
plan to do this around June-July 2008.

For this, we have drafted a self-assessment toolkit which would help
determine your institution’s current capacity for digital asset management.
It will help you assess your institution’s ability / readiness for digital
asset management. Based on that assessment of readiness and maturity, later
project outputs will provide recommendations on appropriate steps to take to
improve digital asset management for you. (We’re approaching different
institutions who are likely to be at different stages of maturity). The
toolkit can be found at http://aida.jiscinvolve.org/toolkit/.

The process and the outputs of this project may be of some benefit to you.
We think that the tools, guidance and case studies will help institutions
understand how to take small steps forward to improve institutional maturity
in regard to digital asset management and preservation concerns.

We’re looking to work with the following information experts: records
managers, librarians, digital librarians, data curators, repository
managers, information managers, digital asset managers, web masters,
archivists, and others. Our guess is that there is no single person in the
institution who can do the entire self-assessment, so it may turn into a
team effort. There is also the possibility of on-site support or remote
support from ULCC. We’re able to provide some financial support, via our
JISC funding, to a small number of case-study sites.

If you’re interested in participating, we are looking at starting around
June or July 2008, depending on availability of yourself and your staff. We
expect the work to take an absolute maximum of eight days, but our hope and
expectation is that it will be less for many institutions. At this stage, we
are looking for participation from UK Higher Education institutions only,
although comments from others are welcome.

Further information is available at our project website.

Contacts: Ed Pinsent ([log in to unmask]) / Patricia Sleeman
([log in to unmask])