UBdigit is a developing local repository—an asset management infrastructure—for a variety of University at Buffalo (UB) digital material including course content, image collections and archival holdings. Like other universities, UB is witnessing an evolution of digital collection building from highly idiosyncratic digital projects to controlled environments for the development of select unique content. UBdigit is facilitating campus-wide migration from isolated digital projects to integrated digital collection development within an nascent institutional repository environment.
Campus Context
The campus is becoming an increasingly media-rich interdisciplinary learning space that mandates ready access to not only digital texts but also visual and audio materials. Faculty and learners wish to choose among an ever broadening array of traditional research and teaching materials, including digital media objects. The campus teaching/learning culture is marked by a new media reality in which we see the ascendancy of media learning objects across disciplines and where “reading” media is a legitimate scholarly activity. Students entering the university are representative of an arguably more media-literate millennial generation who view digital content as integral elements of their academic work. Digital content is being created in a variety of formats for delivery to users over networks, on removable storage media, and on a variety of mobile computing devices. Dependable and easy access to these materials in part provides both the backdrop and the motivation for university-wide collaborative development of a digital asset management project such as UBdigit.
Growing demand for digital content has resulted in the proliferation of idiosyncratic local digitization projects. Historically, these digital projects have grown out of faculty scholarly interests or library special collections and have been produced to fulfill a specific local purpose, such as teaching, research, access, and/or preservation. Among them are many highly-valued digital collections that facilitate shared content but often they lack content management, are wasteful of institutional resources for digital efforts, and are not now scalable or compliant with emerging repository standards. Additionally, these collections have not been developed or optimized for integration with larger projects, other digital collections, or repositories.
By applying asset, data, and infrastructure standards to existing and new digital collections, UBdigit provides a controlled environment that facilitates and promotes integration of our project-based digital content with larger digital library and repository content.
Figure 1. Adopting standards facilitates asset integration.
Differentiated Needs and Supports
Faculty, librarians, and IT professionals share an interest in the management of digital content – particularly that which is intended for sharing with end-users and for integrating with other information systems. However, we also recognize that not all digital content requires, can, or should receive the same level of treatment (e.g., development, management, distribution, and commitment to preservation and persistence). We differentiate between those assets for which we will provide responsible digital asset management for access, discovery, and use and those for which we will assume institutional repository commitment to persistence.
In either case, agreement on standards for assets and associated metadata records, coordinated development of digital collections, provision of expert services, and provision of scalable organizational and structural environments to sustain collections over time are needed. We have implemented an integrated approach to provide differentiated support to UB digital collections:
UBdigit contains “institutional repository” content—those assets for which we assume a long-term, preservation commitment. These collections contain unique objects for which we are the “institution of record.” UBdigit provides archival quality master digital images and high-level metatdata for these unique collections to promote broadest discovery and use.
The “UBdigit Teaches” segment contains content primarily used for a teaching purpose. It is a utility-driven service to present digital surrogates of analog content previously held in isolated departmental or faculty collections. The goal of UBdigit Teaches is to make these materials more accessible to all university constituents within a secure institutional network. Contributions to UBdigit Teaches are selectively developed against holdings in other university-owned or licensed proprietary collections. For most of these objects we are not the institution of record, and, therefore, we offer much more limited metadata development–sufficient to facilitate discovery and access. Digitization of these materials is toward optimum access and re-use within a variety of presentation and distribution environments.
Development of UBdigit
UBdigit grew out of a faculty-driven community mandate for an infrastructure for shared collections. It is based on a scalable economic principle of distributed responsibility and shared benefits with three main conceptual goals:
- Provide a robust, persistent campus-wide repository for UB’s archival, research, and teaching collections in digital form.
- Provide responsible stewardship for the creation, description, management, storage, and distribution of digital assets.
- Emphasize utility, standards, access, and economy of scale.
The institution augmented these conceptual goals with administrative mandates to promote efficient and economic use of institutional resources (investments, time and effort), avoid redundancies and focus on unique contributions, utilize broad base of institutional expertise and capacity, and optimize access to content.
In an effort to meet the expectations of our community and our administration, we conducted an institutional scan to analyze local institutional culture, to identify shared goals, and to establish an inclusive foundational network of partners. These include:
- Champions – providing institutional support and guidance for the process
- Visionaries – providing phased planning and project management throughout the planning lifecycle
- Contributors – providing content and expertise throughout project implementation
UBdigit was envisioned, developed, and brought to production in four phases. It is as much an infrastructure for shared collection development as a strategy for introducing a standards-based approach to collection and item level project development.
Phase 1: Development
Three discovery sub-groups (including faculty, visual resource staff, Information Technologists, and library service providers) were established: 1) technical infrastructure, 2) standards for assets and metadata, and 3) project policies and protocols. Each discovery group produced formal reports, which subsequently became project workflows and policy statements. Utilizing a common features/functions checklist and an independent review process, the infrastructure discovery group made a consensus recommendation of CONTENTdm [1] for our underlying data infrastructure. We tested the application on a small data and asset set using the OCLC-hosted environment for both our alpha and beta testing cycles.
Phase 2: Operationalization
Discovery groups prepared standards documentation for digitization, metadata schema, a comprehensive data dictionary, and a metadata crosswalk. These documents are continually amended to accommodate new formats, standards, object types, and metadata schemas as they are implemented within UBdigit.
In phase two, we also developed graphical models and process workflows, including our repository model (see Figure 2), user access model, proposal and review process workflows, etc.
Figure 2. UBdigit access and integration model.
Phase 3: Implementation
The University Libraries host UBdigit on redundant sandbox and production server environments. Library staff provide server and application support including application customization, GUI development, documentation, beta and production rollouts and data loads, quality assurance checks, and application version migrations.
Phase 4: Production
We currently host two repository segments: UBdigit (public access repository) and UBdigit Teaches (authenticated access to UB community only). Collections are drawn from the UB Libraries, institutional archives and special collections, and from academic department and faculty collections. Content currently includes still images and will soon incorporate audio and time-based media. In the future we anticipate kinetic images, animations, virtual-reality, interactive sequences, and multimedia constructs—in essence, any Web-deliverable media content that serves a teaching or scholarly purpose.
Both UBdigit and UBdigit Teaches collections are selected and prioritized for development from contributing units and individual faculty across the campus. Each proposed collection undergoes a pre-production evaluation process to determine development parameters, specifically scalable collection-level standards paired to institutional commitment that set realistic minimums/maximums for economic production and file maintenance over time. Some evaluation criteria include:
- Degree of access - authorization/authentication requirements based on intellectual property conditions
- Depth of metadata - development needed to facilitate discovery and to enable integration with other digital collections to the appropriate degree versus “institution of record” requirement for full metadata development
- Digitization targets - for archival master files and distributable services files
- Commitment to persistence - e.g., “trusted digital repository” commitment, or network redundancy, or highly available/offline/near line access to redundant copy
The Libraries are the UBdigit stewards and provide central support for the persistent environment. The Libraries are responsible for UBdigit governance, advocacy for resource allocation, project management, standards development and quality assurance, systems and applications support, network capacity, security, and archiving.
Contributing units provide content and support for UBdigit from libraries, visual resource collections, academic collections, and museum collections. Contributors assume responsibility for digital collection curation, metadata development, and content authority for individual collections within UBdigit.
To see UBdigit in production, please visit our website.
Figure 3. UBdigit website screenshot.
The “About” section of the website provides documentation on each phase, as well as contact information and policy documents. You can browse UBdigit by collection or through a variety of search interfaces from keyword to advanced with delimiting functions throughout. We currently host a variety of collections developed to support the teaching, archival and research interests of the university and to provide visibility for unique institutional holdings. Some examples are detailed below.
Evolutionary Biology Digital Dissection Collection
Co-developed with the Department of Biological Sciences
This collection captures born-digital dissection imagery developed in 1998 for use and distribution through a stand-alone course Web page. The digital content was repurposed in 2000 for a mastery-learning component within a course management system self-assessment module. In UBdigit, the images were disaggregated from the linear CMS presentation. Each multi-view animal dissection is presented as part of a compound object set; each view can also be searched and viewed independent of the compound set, allowing users to create combinations and learning sets to meet their own learning needs.
Figure 4. Compound object menu screen.
Pulp Fiction Cover Art Collection [2]
Co-developed with the Arts & Sciences Libraries and the University Libraries Special Collections
The UB Libraries’ George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection is one of the largest (over 30,000 volumes) collections of well-preserved pulp fiction in the world. This UBdigit collection provides researchers with JPEG2000 (pan and zoom) views of the cover, back, and spines of this graphically-intense, mid-twentieth century, mass media art form.
Figure 5. Sample cover art: Beware the Lady, Cornell Woolrich (author),
George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection.
Log of the Good Yacht Althea on the Summer Cruise of 1914
Developed by John Bewley, UB Music Library
One-of-a-kind legacy objects are preserved through digitization and presented for wide access. This typescript sailing log was written by Louis Wright Simpson and consists of 46 typescript leaves with thirty 2“x 3" photographs attached. This UBdigit OCR-scanned, full text resource allows users to explore the log page by page, or by keyword and delimited searching functions.
Figure 6. Digital preservation OCR scan of archival text.
Edgar R. McGuire Historical Medical Instrument Collections
Co-developed with the UB Health Sciences Library History of Medicine Collection
The collection contains more than 150 instruments (primarily 19th century) or sets of instruments chosen for their illustration of past medical and dental procedures.
Figure 7. 19th century syringe, Joseph Frederic Benoit (designer),
McGuire Medical Instrument Collection.
UBdigit Next Steps
UBdigit and UBdigit Teaches are actively developing new collections using an interdisciplinary contributor model. By inviting collaboration among variously expert partners, we are able to grow both in volume and diversity. Among our near-term challenges are achieving interoperability with other UB and proprietary digital asset collections and experiments with data harvesting, extraction, and ingest. We hope to achieve a higher degree of integration with external digital library and repository initiatives. Within UB and SUNY there is growing interest in both shared collection building and institutional repositories. Because UBdigit adheres to rigorous metadata standards and leverages OAI harvesting protocols, it is useful both as an infrastructure model and as ground for integration with experimental initiatives, such as SUNY DSpace, [3] and to explore broader integrations with collectives, such as ARTstor and the National Science Digital Libraries.
For more information on UBdigit,visit our website or contact us at ubdigit@buffalo.edu.
Notes:
[1] OCLC provides licensing for CONTENTdm digital collection management software.
[2] Most of the cover art in this collection corresponds to texts analyzed in the UB Libraries’ Gumshoes, Sleuths & Snoopers database at: http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/kelley/KelleyAdvanced.asp. For more information on the George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection, see the website at: http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/lml/kelley/.
[3] SUNY DSpace, digital repository of the State University of New York, see http://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/.
