Facet Publishing have announced the release of Heather Ryan and Walker Sampson’s The No-nonsense Guide to Born-digital Content.

Libraries and archives of all sizes are collecting and managing an increasing proportion of digital content. Within this body of digital content is a growing pool of ‘born-digital’ content: content that has been created and has often existed solely in digital form. The No-nonsense Guide to Born-digital Content explains step by step processes for developing and implementing born-digital content workflows in library and archive settings and includes a range of case studies collected from small, medium and large institutions internationally.
 
Authors Heather Ryan and Walker Sampson said, “Our book is for librarians and archivists who have found themselves managing or are planning to manage born-digital content and who may feel somewhat unsure of their ability to take on a task that by all appearances demands a high level of technological expertise”.

The book covers the basics of digital information; selection, acquisition, accessioning and ingest; description, preservation and access; methods for designing and implementing workflows for born-digital collection processing; and strategies and philosophies to move forward as technologies change.

Trevor Owens, Head of Digital Content Management at the Library of Congress said, “Librarians, archivists and museum professionals need to collectively move away from thinking about digital, and in particular born-digital, as being niche topics for specialists. If our institutions are to meet the mounting challenges of serving the cultural memory functions of an increasingly digital-first society the institutions themselves need to transition to become digital-first themselves. We can’t just keep hiring a handful of people with the word ‘digital’ in their job titles. You don’t go to a digital doctor to get someone who uses computing as part of their medical practice, and we can’t expect that the digital archivists are the ones who will be the people who do digital things in archives. The things this book covers are things that all cultural heritage professionals need to get up to speed on”.

Heather Ryan is the Director of Special Collections, Archives & Preservation and Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries. She earned her PhD in Information and Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Walker Sampson is the Digital Archivist at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries. He earned his MS in Information Science at the University of Texas at Austin before beginning work at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 2011.

More information: http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=301959

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