Digital Curation Planning at Michigan State University

Abstract

Recognizing the need for guiding the management and preservation of MichiganR esearch universities and other large organizations continue to create and amass large volumes of digital assets and information. The inherent fragility of digital material because of technology obsolescence and physical threats such as media instability put these valuable digital assets at risk of eventual inaccessibility. In 2009, Michigan State University (MSU) confronted the problem of management and long-term preservation (curation) of its digital assets by implementing a digital curation planning project. The University Archives and Historical Collections (UAHC), MSU Libraries, and MATRIX: Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online collaborated in this exploration of digital asset management at the university with the goal of developing campuswide guidelines for good practices in digital curation. This paper describes the MSU project beginning with the institutional context and challenges of digital asset management faced by a major research university and explains the plans, methods, and results of the study. The project team developed and implemented a self-selective, campuswide survey of digital assets and technological infrastructures using a web-based questionnaire. After the project team analyzed the results of the questionnaire, they selected eleven units for in-depth, one-on-one interviews regarding their digital curation practices. The paper concludes with recommended next steps in digital curation planning for MSU. The MSU study may serve as a model for similar research at other universities; the MSU recommendations also may be relevant.

When Data Curation Isn't: A Redefinition for Liberal Arts Universities

“…3). Academic libraries took up the challenge shortly thereafter (Boock & Chadwell, 2010;Schmidt et al, 2011;Peters & Dryden, 2011), seeking to capitalize on the potential captured in Sayeed Choudhury's claim that "data sets are the new special collections" (Palmer et al, 2010, slide 3). Purdue University provides an early example.…”

How can libraries and other academic stakeholders engage in making data open?

“…Data diversity, tools and researcher needs should not be measured at the disciplinary level but at the research group level. In the literature review we have come across several recommendations that stress that for advocacy and training purposes interviews, case studies and surveys should be developed to understand researcher requirements and behaviour [3,9,13,22,27]. This must be the basis for developing advocacy/training materials that will motivate researchers, as well as making them understand the obligations to institutions, funders and the public.…”

“…This has to change. Preparing data management plans and training staff to accomplish them is new and mostly unchartered waters for universities and research institutions but there are some good examples of and reports on how to support these institutions in open data management [18,21,22,27].…”