Link for this site: go.osu.edu/Libraries-DPA

Purpose

The Digital Preservation & Access work-group (DP&A) works to coordinate the long-term curation of digital collections at The Ohio State University Libraries (University Libraries). The DP&A’s purpose is to guide the University Libraries' policies, strategies and tactics for managing, preserving and providing access to its digital collections. It brings together key individuals from across the organization to ensure that information sharing and best practices are reflected throughout the organization.

Areas for Investigation

Define, refine, and clarify roles and responsibilities around preservation and curation of digital collections
Standardize accessioning and processing of born digital collections
Standardize the digitization processing for at risk collections
Standardize the digitization prioritization and processing for providing online access to collections
Ensure consistent implementation of metadata profiles
Implement best practices for digital collection lifecycle management
Continually evaluate University Libraries’ current capabilities, and make recommendations with input from all stakeholders around the evolution of services

Members

Morag Boyd, Acquisition & Discovery Strategist
Miriam Centeno, Preservation & Digitization Strategist
Nena Couch, Head, Area Studies & Special Collections
Courtney Hunt, Art and Design Librarian
Johanna Meetz, Publishing & Repository Services Librarian
Dan Noonan, Digital Preservation Librarian (convener)
Terry Reese, Head, Digital Initiatives & Infrastructure Support
Beth Snapp Head, Application Development & Support
Maureen Walsh, Scholarly Sharing Strategist

Meetings

The DP&A work-group will maintain monthly meeting notes at:

DP&A Meeting Notes 2020-2022

Projects

Digital Preservation & Access Workflow Analysis

The mapping end-to-end the current state of the digital preservation and access workflows. The goal is to identify our existing workflows that affect born digital acquisitions and processing, digitization, providing access to digital materials and the preservation thereof. Answering the question, “What are the intersections, gaps, redundancies and areas for improvement?”

Initial Recommendations (2021)

In the Fall of 2021, based upon the discussion both within the DP&A and externally through the workflow documentation process, the DP&A developed and presented to its sponsors and initial set of five (5) key organizational gaps, their implications and recommendations to remediate and ameliorate these conditions. These five areas included:

Processing of materials
Prioritization and governance: this recommendation was additionally informed by the Digital Projects Planning, Priorities and Transparency project noted below; and has been actively worked on, since November of 2020 via the Digital Content Policy/Governance project linked below.
Process management
Resources
Documentation

A full accounting of the recommendations can be found in the Initial Recommendations document or on the Initial Recommendations (2021) wiki page.

Digital Projects Planning, Priorities and Transparency

The purpose of this project is to determine a process or set of processes that enables the University Libraries to effectively plan and prioritize digital projects, while transparently communicating and making that information available to the Libraries and its partners.

Digital Content Policy/Governance

This project is an outgrowth of initial findings from the Workflow Analysis project and Digital Projects Planning, Priorities and Transparency discussions. The findings include the need for a digital content policy, priority management, process controls, consolidated project documentation and designated repository for it, mechanisms for the transfer of knowledge resulting from staff turnover (or simply the passage of time).

Parking Lot

The "Parking Lot" began as a traditional parking lot to document, as we conduct our meetings and projects, topics may come up that are related, that may not currently be in scope. It was intended to allow us to put a "pin in it" and then reviewing it on a regular basis to determine when and if it will enter a work queue. Well it morphed into an ares where we have been documenting gaps identified in our SIPOC/RACI/BW activities As we conduct our meetings and projects, topics may come up that are related, but may not currently be in scope.