Digital McGill Jenn Riley Associate Dean, Digital Initiatives McGill University Library

What are we responsible for curating?

 Primarily digitized versions of analogue rare/unique/archival/valuable materials  Close collaborations with Rare Books & Special Collections, and McGill University Archives  Currently working on collection prioritization and scaling up production Digitized content

 Institutional mandate  Determined by records retention schedule  Involves transfer of selected records from originating departments after the end of their immediate life  Archival appraisal practices determine what to keep Born digital university records of long term value

 Fonds of personal papers and organizational records  The same types of documents we’ve already collected in paper form  Examples of paper archival fonds from the past:  Montréal Natural History Society  James McGill MS 435  George Mercer Dawson (President of Royal Society of Canada)  Harvey Cushing Fonds (William Osler biographer) Born digital archival materials

 E.g., digital art and digital humanities projects  Often more like software than a set of standalone files  High risk of loss compared to analogue ancestors Born digital creative content

 Typically we only have remote access, are not responsible directly for curation  In some cases we must deliver ourselves rather than rely on the vendor  And in these cases, we take on curation responsibility Some licensed/purchased digital content

 McGill students required to deposit masters and doctoral theses, sign a non-exclusive license to disseminate  Policy allows students to request a 1-year embargo  Students retain copyright  McGill does not contract with ProQuest for ETD delivery and preservation  McGill participates in Theses CanadaTheses Canada  Some courses show interest in pushing student work to ETDs and other student work

 Supporting “green OA”  In fulfillment of funder mandates  Or voluntarily  Still not heavily used, at McGill or elsewhere  No serious discussion yet at McGill about a campus mandate  Expecting Canadian Tri-Council OA mandate beginning May 1, 2015 Pre-prints/post-prints

 BIG new focus  Studies show significant loss of data sets over time  Odds of data supporting a paper being extant fall by 17% per year (Vines et al 2014; doi: /j.cub )  Some studies show a citation advantage for papers with open data  30% for papers published in 2004 and 2005 (Piwowar and Vision, 2013; doi: /peerj.175)  Expecting Canadian Tri-Council data management planning requirements in 2015/2016 Research data

How do we curate it?

Find/Collect It ……

 As difficult as any other step  Luckily, it’s not an all or nothing proposition  Some areas we’re pretty good at (ETDs, digitized collections)  Others we try but with limited success (pre-prints/post-prints)  Others are brand new to us (research data, born digital archival materials, born digital creative content) This is difficult!

 Determine what’s worth keeping  Create/map metadata  Responsibility to handle personally identifiable information carefully Processing and organizing

Find/Collect It Put It Somewhere Safe …

 Digitization master files to NCS for storage  Backups of files/servers (digital collections, born digital university records)  Multiple copies including one off site  eScholarship is a “repository” but not a “preservation repository”  Reliance on external vendors (licensed content)  E.g., through LOCKSS  We run a LOCKSS node at McGill  And the stuff we’re not handling so well (born digital special collections/archival materials) Several different approaches in place now

What about access?

 Need better repositories  That handle common use cases  Hierarchical file structures  Paged objects  Display common file types in-browser  That are connected to preservation systems and manage content in them How do we make this better?

Find/Collect It Put It Somewhere Safe Keep It Safe Over Time

 Harder than the paper world!  What is “the long term”?  How long will Universities exist in their current form?  How long will computers continue to function the way they do now?  How will metadata structures evolve over this period of time?  What does a “pay once” model for digital preservation look like?  What criteria do we use to determine the useful lifespan of a digital file?  It’s about policy as much as technology  How do our organizations set things up to ensure someone takes an active management role over time Yeah, this is hard

 Standardize input file formats to the degree possible  Actively check file integrity  Refresh hardware frequently  Know what will need to be emulated, and what you can safely migrate  Partner! Strategies

 UC San Diego Chronopolis  CLOCKSS CLOCKSS  Portico Portico  Héritage (Canadiana from CRKN) Héritage  Scholars’ Portal Scholars’ Portal  HathiTrust HathiTrust  APTrust APTrust  DPN DPN Who’s doing this well?

 And they all need funding to run  And our organizations pay the membership fees from our institutional budgets  How do we get them all to work together?  Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education That’s a lot of groups!

Biggest decision points

 How many repositories and how they connect  Open source vs locally hosted vended vs cloud  Metadata issues  Keeping up with technological advancements Technical

 How many copies  What preservation actions are necessary  Who to partner with  In Canada or beyond?  Business planning Policy

  These presentation slides: ation.ppt ation.ppt Thank you!