Greg Colati
Associate University Librarian, Archives, Special Collections and Digital Curation
University of Connecticut
Patrick L. Carr
Associate University Librarian for Collections & Discovery
University of Connecticut
At the 2017 CNI Spring Meeting, Clifford Lynch summarized the struggle of academic institutions “…trying to disentangle a set of demands for various types of digital collection management of platforms from things we traditionally think of as repositories.” Lynch discussed how this struggle leads to the key question of “whether an institution should try to have one platform that they use for all digital collections or whether they use separate ones for different types of content.”
At the University of Connecticut (UConn), we took this question and stood it on its heads. Instead of starting with a consideration of technology platforms, we examined the preservation, management, and access characteristics and requirements of the digital content in our collections and built a data architecture framework that is informing the re-development of our digital content management landscape. This landscape includes all digital content the library collects, from reformatted and born-digital cultural heritage to scholarly output and data sets, licensed resources, and locally and remotely controlled information resources. In this session, we will present UConn’s data architecture framework and illustrate how we are using it to examine our collections and our technology systems.
