Press Release from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation:
U.Va. Library Receives $870,000 Grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for Collaborative Effort to Preserve Rare Digital Materials
The University of Virginia Library has received a major grant from The Mellon Foundation for a two-year project to model how institutions can preserve and deliver rare materials that currently exist only in digital form. “Born-digital” materials include the work of contemporary writers and architects, as well as archives of current political figures and organizations. These materials are quickly becoming significant collections that require careful, planned stewardship to ensure their preservation and availability to scholars now and in the future.
Working with programmers and archivists from Stanford and Yale universities, as well as from England’s University of Hull, the group will attempt to create a model for digital collection management that can be easily shared among research libraries and other institutions charged with preserving rare materials. “In the past we got paper manuscripts from notable writers, and now we’re getting their work on hard drives,” said Bradley Daigle, Director of Digital Curation Services for the U.Va. Library and one of the principle investigators for the grant. “We don’t want to lose the record of the artistic development of this work, nor do we want it locked up in technology that may become obsolete in the future. It’s a huge problem that requires a huge solution.”
The group of universities plans to use 13 “born-digital” collections as their test base for the project. The three featured collections from the University of Hull archives are the Mission to Seafarers, the Socialist Health Association and the papers of novelist, screenwriter and director Stephen Gallagher.
The grant also provides for four digital archivists and a programmer who will explore and test how to process, preserve, and deliver different digital collections across multiple institutions. The common approaches devised to archive born-digital “papers” will not only be designed to scale across different institutions, but they will also be demonstrated and proven in practice by the four partner universities. The work will include the creation of web-based tools and services to let librarians, archivists, and eventually users themselves describe, link, preserve, and deliver digital information.
“Most libraries and archives currently lack a framework for collecting and delivering these materials,” said Martha Sites, the U.Va. Library’s Associate University Librarian for Production and Technology Services and a principal investigator for the grant. “The ethical and practical issues that accompany the business of stewarding born-digital collections have not been fully explored, and almost no best practice guidelines exist. This grant will make it possible to inform best practices and build tools that other cultural institutions can easily use in this crucial work.”
The project is well underway and runs until Oct 2011. The project team will not be working in isolation and will be consulting with individuals, projects and institutions across the globe. A key central element of the project is the fact that the four partners are using Fedora, an open-source digital object repository, and I would like to hear from other institutions in the UK using Fedora to store archival digital objects.
More information about the project is available at: http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/ and the project team has just set-up a blog at http://born-digital-archives.blogspot.com/ where we hope to stimulate discussion and report progress!
best wishes
Simon
Simon Wilson
Digital Archivist (AIMS Project)
Hull History Centre
Worship Street
Hull
HU2 8BG
tel 01482 317506
http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/aims/
http://www.hullhistorycente.org.uk