Archives and the Digital Library

William E. Landis · Robin L. Chandler

May 2013 · Routledge

About this ebook

Technological advances and innovative perspectives constantly evolve the notion of what makes up a digital library. Archives and the Digital Library provides an insightful snapshot of the current state of archiving in the digital realm. Respected experts in library and information science present the latest research results and illuminating case studies to provide a comprehensive glimpse at the theory, technological advances, and unique approaches to digital information management as it now stands. The book focuses on digitally reformatted surrogates of non-digital textual and graphic materials from archival collections, exploring the roles archivists can play in broadening the scope of digitization efforts through creatively developing policies, procedures, and tools to effectively manage digital content.

Many of the important advances in digitization of materials have little to do with the efforts of archivists. Archives and the Digital Library concentrates specifically on the developments in the world of archives and the digitization of the unique content of information resources archivists deal with on a constant basis. This resource reviews the current issues and challenges, effective user assessment techniques, various digital resources projects, collaboration strategies, and helpful best practices. The book is extensively referenced and includes helpful illustrative figures.

Topics in Archives and the Digital Library include:

• a case study of LSTA-grant funded California Local History Digital Resources Project
  
• expanding the scope of traditional archival digitations projects beyond the limits of a single institution
  
• a case study of the California Cultures Project
  
• the top ten themes in usability issues
  
• case studies of usability studies, focus groups, interviews, ethnographic studies, and web log analysis
  
• developing a reciprocal partnership with a digital library
  
• the technical challenges in harvesting and managing Web archives
  
• metadata strategies to provide descriptive, technical, and preservation related information about archived Web sites
  
• long-term preservation of digital materials
  
• building a trusted digital repository
  
• collaboration in developing and supporting the technical and organizational infrastructure for sustainability in both academic and state government
  
• the Archivists’ Toolkit software application
  
  

Archives and the Digital Library is timely, important reading for archivists, librarians, library administrators, library information educators, archival educators, and students.

About the author

William E. Landis, MILS, is Head of Arrangement and Description & Metadata Coordinator in Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Prior to that he served as Metadata Coordinator for the California Digital Library; as Manuscripts Librarian in Special Collections and Archives at the University of California, Irvine; and as the first Production Coordinator for the JSTOR Mass Periodical Digitization Initiative. He is an active member of the Society of American Archivists, and has contributed to the Creation, Documentation, and Maintenance of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS). He also serves on the services working group of the Digital Library Federation’s Aquifer Project.

Robin L. Chandler, MA, MLIS, is Director of Data Acquisitions at the California Digital Library and oversees digital content submissions to the online archive of California and Calisphere (Resource for archival finding aids, digital images, and electronic texts) as well as coordinating frameworks to surface digital collections across the University of California through projects like the Open Content Alliance. She has experience providing online access to digital content, including tobacco industry documents at the UCSF library and high-energy physics preprints at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).