Managing Digital Assets: A Primer for Library

and Information Technology Administrators

Libraries are increasingly involved in creating and managing collections of digital content. In February 2005, the Academic Library Advisory Committee of the Council on Library and Information Resources will offer a three-day workshop for library and information technology administrators who need in-depth information about the planning, purchase, implementation, and management of digital assets. The workshop will focus on the latest trends in digital content management, and how mid-sized academic libraries can incorporate new approaches into their operations.

Aside from the largest research institutions, universities and colleges are only beginning to think about how to efficiently manage the growing variety of electronic information for scholarly use that is under their purview. These institutions now accumulate electronic versions of theses, dissertations, scientific data, video, and unpublished research papers. Their librarians now provide access to traditional library content electronically though licensing agreements for journal articles, books, statistical information, music, and more. Still others own specialized, unique, or other local materials that are unlikely to be digitized by anyone else. Some have begun to create and house specialized Web pages of local information resources, as well as digitized manuscripts, archives, learning objects, and images. The pressing issue that all campuses face is how to provide efficiently for storage and retrieval of these growing collections. These institutions also expect their library and technology leaders to make technical and policy choices that ensure their valuable assets will remain accessible over time. Most library directors find themselves poorly prepared to make these decisions, and most will need to work with their technology cohorts to ensure that service needs are met.

The difficulty in creating a digital management strategy stems in part from the bewildering convergence of technological developments. A library is fortunate if it has a director who understands the latest developments such as Shibboleth, SCORM, or EAD, but such understanding is necessary to put in place systems to organize, search, publish and store digital collections.

Developing a digital management strategy is further complicated by the fact that there are no recognized patterns or models for managing digital assets. Some managers seek to develop fully distributed institutional repositories but still must choose between open-source solutions or commercial providers. Others prefer to place their material in one of a limited number of dedicated storage institutions. While best practices may exist for given technical processes, library managers do not have a single paradigm to use as the basis for developing operational plans and policies to capture, store, index, preserve, and redistribute the intellectual output in digital formats.

The workshop will provide library and information managers the tools they need to evaluate the alternatives currently available, and to begin to chart digital asset management strategies for their institution.

Managing Digital Assets: A Primer for Library and Information Technology Administrators

Embassy Suites Historic Charleston Hotel

337 Meeting Street

Charleston, SC 29403

February 4-6, 2005

Schedule, Content, and Presenters

Friday, February 4

4:00 pm-6:00 pm Registration

6:30 pm-9:00 pm Reception, dinner, and keynote speaker

A broad overview of the various issues and developments surrounding Digital Asset Management

Keynote Speaker: Donald Waters

Saturday, February 5

7:00 am-8:30 am Continental Breakfast

8:30 am-10:30 am Overview of Content and Technology Issues

Presenters

David Seaman, Content

Cliff Lynch, CNI, Technology

10:30 am-11:00 am Break (Posters set up in the break area)

11:00 am-12:30 pm Creation/Procurement of Digital Information

Speakers

Joyce Ray, IMLS, to speak to the practical issues of digitization of local materials

Ann Okerson, Yale University Library, to speak to shifting scholarly communication models, the limitations of licensing and the future of open access publishing

Will Thomas, University of Virginia, to speak to the issues of working with libraries to build faculty-driven archives and collections

12:30 pm-1:30 pm Lunch

1:30 pm-3:00 pm Poster Sessions

Demonstrations that highlight the range of digital asset management activities of mid-sized academic libraries. Identifying people and topics TBD

3:00 pm-3:30 pm Break

3:30 pm-5:30 pm Organization/Description Topics

Speakers

Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC Office of Research, on metadata creation, harvesting, etc

Ken Klingenstein, University of Colorado, on middleware developments like Shibboleth or rights management software that impact library applications

6:00 pm-7:00 pm Reception at the College of Charleston

Dinner on your own in Charleston ( list of good restaurants to be provided)

Sunday, February 6

8:00 am-9:00 am Continental Breakfast

9:00 am-10:30 am Curation/ Distribution Topics

Curation Speakers

Abby Smith, CLIR, on the national preservation infrastructure and how it benefits smaller libraries

Ann Wolpert, MIT Libraries, on Dspace and practical experiments in the use of repositories and making the organizational case for curation

Distribution Speakers

David A. Greenbaum, UC Berkeley Interactive University, on developing faculty and teacher toolkits that gather and share digital content

Mary Lou Goodyear, University of Kansas, to speak to making the organizational case for distribution

10:30 am-11:00 am Break

11:00 am-12:00 noon Recap of what has been learned

Panel consisting of selected attendees to the conference

12 noon Adjourn