Jan 07, 2019 “What were we thinking?” Successes and lessons learned after going live with our digital preservation program

In a previous post, I announced the Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future book that I was privileged to edit and was recently published by ALA Editions. Within this book, I had the opportunity to co-author a chapter with Tawnya Keller.

This chapter, titled “‘What were we thinking?’ Successes and lessons learned after going live with our digital preservation program,” includes a history of digital preservation activities at the Marriott Library, starting in 2008 and going through today. Here is the abstract for this chapter:

The J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah began to seriously investigate preserving its digital assets in 2008 and went live with a digital preservation system (DPS) in 2014. This chapter serves as a case study of the library’s overall digital preservation program, and discusses the investigation into and eventual implementation of the DPS. The installation process, which took more than one year, ended with the library’s in-house developers creating the Submission Information Metadata Packaging (SIMP) Tool, a workflow management tool that changed the way content is ingested into the library’s digital asset management system (DAMS) and DPS. This case study will provide a history of the initial decisions made concerning ingestion workflow, metadata field inclusion, and the prioritization of objects for digital preservation. We will share successes encountered and lessons learned, along with a discussion of how those initial decisions have changed over time as the digital preservation team gained more experience and as the importance of digital preservation grew within the institution. This case study concludes with an outline of the current status of the library’s digital preservation program and an evaluation of the next steps going forward to increase the functionality, sustainability, and trustworthiness of this program.

An open access version of this chapter can be found in USpace.