FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
November 20, 2009
IMLS Press Contacts
202-653-4632
Jeannine Mjoseth, jmjoseth@imls.gov
Mamie Bittner, mbittner@imls.gov
International Collaboration
to Close the Digital Curation Gap
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Washington, DC—Scientists,
researchers, and scholars across the world generate vast
amounts of digital data, but the scientific record and
the documentary heritage created in digital form are at
risk -- from technology obsolescence, from the fragility
of digital media, and from the lack of baseline practices
for managing and preserving digital data. The University
of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) School of Information
and Library Science, working with the Institute of Museum
and Library Services (IMLS) and partners in the United
Kingdom (U.K.), are collaborating on the Closing the Digital
Curation Gap (CDCG) project to establish baseline practices
for the storage, maintenance, and preservation of digital
data to help ensure their enhancement and continuing long-term
use. Because digital curation, or the management and preservation
of digital data over the full life cycle, is of strategic
importance to the library and archives fields, IMLS is
funding the project through a cooperative agreement with
UNC-CH. U.K. partners include the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC), which supports innovation in digital
technologies in U.K. colleges and universities, and its
funded entities, the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA)
and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC).
Well-curated data can be made accessible
for a variety of audiences. For example, the data gathered
by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (www.sdss.org)
at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico is available
to professional astronomers worldwide as well as to schoolchildren,
teachers, and citizen scientists through its Galaxy Zoo
project. Galaxy Zoo, now in its second version, invites
citizen scientists to assist in classifying over a million
galaxies (www.galaxyzoo.org).
With good preservation techniques, this data will be available
into the future to provide documentation of the sky as
it currently appears.
Data and information science researchers
have already developed many viable applications, models,
strategies, and standards for the long term care of digital
objects. This project will help bridge a significant gap
between the progress of digital curation research and
development and the professional practices of archivists,
librarians, and museum curators. Project partners will
develop guidelines for digital curation practices, especially
for staff in small to medium-sized cultural heritage institutions
where digital assets are most at risk. Larger institutions
will also benefit. To develop baseline practices, a working
group will establish and support a network of digital
curation practitioners, researchers, and educators through
face-to-face meetings, web-based communication, and other
communication tools. Project staff will also use surveys,
interviews, and case studies to develop a plan for ongoing
development of digital curation frameworks, guidance,
and best practices. The team will also promote roles that
various organizations can play and identify future opportunities
for collaboration.
As part of this project, the Digital Curation
Manual, which is maintained by the DCC, will be updated
and expanded www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters
and the Digital Curation Exchange web portal will receive
support (http://digitalcurationexchange.org).
Through these efforts, the CDCG project will lay the foundation
that will inform future training, education, and practice.
The project’s research, publications, practical
tool integration, and outreach and training efforts will
be of value to organizations charged with maintaining
digital assets over the long term.
The CDGP will be based upon findings from
a number of efforts supported by IMLS, the U.K. and the
U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). U.K. funding for
digital curation has focused largely on developing U.K.-wide
digital repositories, especially in the sciences, and
on training data curators, working in disciplines served
by the particular repositories. IMLS funding has focused
on research and development projects that build the capacity
of libraries to preserve and manage digital content, and
on building the capacity of graduate schools of library
and information science to offer educational programs
that prepare librarians and archivists for these new roles.
The NSF, through its DataNet program, is supporting large-scale
collaborative projects that provide reliable digital preservation,
access, integration, and analysis capabilities for science
data over a decades-long timeline, and contribute to an
interoperable data preservation and access network.
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