As libraries and other cultural heritage organizations digitize materials from their archives or special collections, they often have multiple goals in mind. At least two of them often are: making collections accessible to the world through the web, and preserving the newly created digital assets for future generations.
Accessible Collections
Once objects in a collection are digitized, be they images, audio, video, or something else, it is relatively easy to get that content up online somewhere. Maybe the CMS that hosts the library website allows image uploads or video embedding. The library might also have accounts on various media sharing platforms like Flickr, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
While putting the freshly digitized content online somewhere that is accessible for new audiences is part of the goal, the long-term accessibility of the content also must be planned for. It is not quite enough to think we bought that expensive external hard drive for our original high resolution scans and we can always get it from the file cabinet if the website crashes or Flickr goes away.
Digital Preservation
Following digital preservation best practices certainly is more work than just scanning some images and putting them online. The research and planning that is put into the project up front will have payoffs over the long-term.
It is inevitable that current systems and processes will not exist in the same way decades from now. The best way to prepare for that inevitability is to make sure you are following practices with future technology migrations in mind. This includes:
- following best-practice scanning standards to capture high-quality images
- using common metadata schemas that capture information at a granular level
Additionally, the systems used to store objects and metadata must be able to export the assets fully with their integrity verified. Keeping a copy of original TIFF scan on a hard drive in a drawer will not give you that kind of guarantee.
DAMS as a Solution
Digital asset management systems are built to address these types of needs. Many such systems, like Fedora, are open source and have been developed with library and archival assets in mind for long-term preservation.
When objects are ingested into these systems, they are stored in a way that the system itself can check if the content has changed at any time, due to accidental editing or even disk errors. This sort of data-integrity checking allows content managers to be alerted immediately when an object may need to be replaced by a backup copy. Keeping the original digitized masters in the DAMS along with any derivatives used for display ensures that the best version will always be available in the future.
Workflows in a DAMS also help to tie digital assets more closely together with their metadata. The metadata becomes an integral part of what makes up the complete digital object. There is no more distinction between some description text kept in one file and the image it describes kept in another file on a computer file system.
By organizing objects in this way, they are also more easily exportable. Complete objects can be described by schema such as METS and/or packaged in formats such as BagIt so that they can be transported to new systems without issue. Metadata that contains the data integrity checks can also be included in the objects themselves to be certain no loss has occurred.
Some digital asset management systems like Islandora extend the capabilities of repository software like Fedora to make it easy to reach the goal of long-term digital preservation as well as the easy and attractive display of digital objects. By using Drupal for management and display of objects in the Fedora repository, libraries can take advantage of the worldwide community of Drupal developers to help get their digital collections up online.