Kevin Comerford
Director of Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication
University of New Mexico
Karl Benedict
Director of Research Data Services
University of New Mexico
Antonio Guillermo Martínez
Founder and CEO
Libnova
Anthony Helm
Head of Digital Media and Library Technologies
Dartmouth College
“Building Digital Preservation Infrastructure: Partners, Tools and Services” (Comerford et al)
Over the past year the University of New Mexico (UNM) Libraries instituted a new digital preservation initiative that was literally built from the ground up. Initially conceived as a means to preserve the libraries’ digital collections, the project involved developing program structure, improving tools and working with vendors. As the project developed, the digital preservation needs of a broader community than originally planned became vividly apparent, and it evolved into a much larger endeavor that includes preservation of research data, university archives and digital cultural heritage collections from partner institutions around the state. The presenters will discuss their experiences implementing digital preservation at UNM, and talk about how the initiative is starting to encompass the preservation needs of partner organizations.
Presentation (Comerford)
“XCDAS: The Evolution of a Standards-Based Library Repository System at Dartmouth” (Helm)
The Dartmouth College Library has been working with digital objects in its collections for several years and currently maintains a variety of vended, open source, and locally developed solutions to manage and deliver these objects to the local and global online research community. In 2011, following the creation of “The Dartmouth Digital Library Program Plan” and with work underway on the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project to create a Scholarly Digital Edition of the papers of Samson Occom, the Library began to coalesce its development strategy around a stack of predominantly open source software already being used to manage XML documents since the early 2000s, rather than to pursue the emerging Hydra technology stack. The result is XCDAS (XML Collections and Digital Archive Storage), an ever-evolving set of tools to manage TEI text collections, e-books, maps, posters, and manuscripts. The current system is managing over 200,000 bagged objects, over 200,000 derivative files, and 1500 XML documents. This presentation gives an overview of the technical infrastructure and of the system itself, which includes tools for working with master file packages, generating derivative files, performing archive validation and consistency checking, converting simplified markup to TEI, and for publishing web sites via XSL transformations.