The Rise of Digital Curation and Cyberinfrastructure: From Experimentation to Implementation, and Maybe Integration
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RepositoriesThe Atkins Report on cyberinfrastructure recommended increasing NSF’s annual budget by $1 billion for computational centers and basic and applied research on cyberinfrastructure, with an investment of $185 million per year in data repositories and $30 million in digital libraries. It acknowledged the need for “well curated data repositories,” but it envisioned that the funds would support 50 to 100 disciplinary repositories through NSF grants, with additional repositories to be supported by other federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and NASA. It called for research on better ways to organize and manage large repositories through software infrastructure and the development of standards to ensure interoperability through automated techniques that would “allow data to be self-documenting and discoverable” (Atkins, p. 77)Digital repositories are key to connecting digital curation to cyberinfrastructure. They are critical to the concept of a distributed, trustworthy data network as well as to the profession(s) required to manage the network and the communities that contribute trustworthy data to it. But the early vision of cyberinfrastructure emphasized technologies over human activities and placed too much faith in the ability of software to substitute for ongoing governance. It also minimized the challenges of achieving interoperability of data across a wide range of disciplines without centralized coordination. .The OAIS Reference ModelIn the language of digital curation, a digital repository is not just any data storage system. To be trustworthy, it must be managed with the intention of long-term use and in accordance with the archival principles of authenticity, integrity and provenance. These terms are generally understood to mean that the repository must conform to the principles of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model, which embodies the archival concepts needed for long-term preservation and access. 
OAIS Reference Model, ISO 14721:2003 Published by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems—an international body of space agencies, including NASA—and approved as a standard by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in 2003, the Reference Model describes the environment, functional components and information objects within a preservation system. Its major contribution is that it specifies terminology (e.g., Submission Information Package, Archival Information Package, and Dissemination Information Package), concepts and a workflow model of how data moves through a repository, from ingest to management within the repository to how it is provided to users (Ball, 2006). The OAIS Reference Model became well-recognized by virtue of its frequent appearance in PowerPoint presentations, but as a high-level conceptual representation it only laid the initial groundwork for the development of repository standards. These standards would require another decade of development, resulting in the publication of Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories: Recommended Practice (TDR) in 2011, approved as an ISO standard in March 2012 (Audit, 2011). I’ll come back to this later in discussion of digital curation tools. Meanwhile, many people observed that while the OAIS Reference Model is important as a representation of digital content workflows in a repository, it doesn’t address what happens before ingest. This is where digital curation, with its introduction of a conceptual timeline—the data lifecycle—as well as the archival functions of appraisal and selection, makes a critical contribution to the digital workflow model. To consider how the idea of the data lifecycle has influenced the management of digital assets, it’s useful to review federal support for the development of digital libraries, preservation and curation. Federal Funding The early investment of federal dollars in digital libraries was in research grants awarded by NSF and described elsewhere in this issue. I was fortunate, through the generosity of my NSF colleagues, to participate in many NSF workshops and meetings supported by NSF’s Digital Library Initiatives I and II. As the Associate Deputy Director for Library Services at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), I benefited from following these developments in helping to shape the IMLS funding strategy for digital libraries, preservation and curation.From the beginning, IMLS focused its limited funds on supporting applied research and practical applications of digital technology that would help libraries, archives and museums develop digital capacity (i.e., the infrastructure of technology and human expertise). At first, our efforts were more or less limited to digitization. As a new federal agency established in 1996, IMLS had the distinction of being the first federal agency with statutory authority to fund digitization, as this was specifically identified as a funding priority in its authorizing legislation. IMLS awarded its first competitive grants in the newly created National Leadership Grant program in 1998. We realized quickly that there was a great deal of interest in digitization but that only a few institutions had enough expertise to write competitive grant proposals describing their digitization plans. Our first application guidelines were no help, as they provided no guidance on how to plan and implement a successful digitization project. We began to try to capture the knowledge of the emerging digitization experts among our grantees and reviewers, who were primarily located in research university libraries, and disseminate this knowledge to those in the broader cultural heritage community who were eager to learn.Working with these experts, IMLS created resources for applicants that now appear in its grant guidelines as “Resources for Projects that Develop Digital Products” and “Specifications for Projects that Develop Digital Products.” Applicants are required to complete the Specifications form if the plan to create any type of digital asset, whether digitized or born-digital (Institute, 2012). In 2000, we initiated the annual Webwise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital Age, which provided IMLS grantees and other experts an opportunity to discuss their work and gave prospective applicants a chance to learn from their colleagues.Directory: bitstream -> handle -> 1774.2 handle -> Master of science 1774.2 -> Healthcare utilization among persons living with hiv with attention to the influences of hepatitis handle -> The Economics of Technology Sharing: Open Source and Beyond Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole handle -> A dissertation handle -> Mobile augmented reality applications for library services handle -> Libraries, Archives, and Museums as Epistemic Infrastructure1 Download 83.08 Kb. Share with your friends:
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