Digital Preservation Task Force: Charge

Objective: Establish and coordinate policies and practice across applicable RUL departments to support digital preservation efforts. Make use of existing digitization capabilities across RUL departments and to identify and execute short-term projects, as well as recommend procedures and practices for longer-term efforts.

1. Identify available internal capabilities for digital preservation.
2. Create, utilize existing, and recommend procedures for digital preservation which includes:
   1. Recommend which practices to use based on analyzing practices already in use or underway.
      1. For Digital Surrogates (items created from Analog sources)
      2. For Born Digital Objects (items for which the source has always been digital)
   2. Standards and formats to be used.
   3. Identify who is best suited to perform the work based on capabilities and infrastructure. Example: outsourcing vs. using internal staff and hardware.
   4. Criteria for selection, triage and handling of materials for digitization.
   5. Investigation of external resources (i.e. LOCKSS, Portico) and identifying their strengths and weaknesses vs. existing internal digital preservation platforms (i.e. RUcore)

Outcomes:

• Recommendations addressing each issue listed above, and any other issues identified.
• Written procedures for digital preservationists and RUL faculty and staff engaged in digital preservation work
• Training, presentation and outreach as needed.

Milestones (timeframe to be determined by the group)

• Make inquiries, compile initial list of endangered collections prioritized for digital preservation
• Analyze existing standards and best practices, and make recommendations for standardization
  • Define digital preservation and how RUL will apply the concept
  • Recommended procedures, best practices and standards for digital preservation based on object type
  • Document procedures for selecting and prioritizing content for digital preservation

It should be noted that the task force will not be required to achieve these objectives from a clean slate. A wealth of established standards and best practices for digitization of basic object types has already been established an adopted for several pre-existing digital projects.

Ad-hoc standards no doubt exist for the selection of physical object collections for digital preservation work within RUL departments. The task force should actively look at these existing standards, determine if revisions or updates are needed, and make decisions on whether or how they should be implemented RUL-wide.

January 26, 2010
(2.0 -- Revised after meeting on February 1, 2010