Digital collection in the wild

We have spent the past few weeks examining the difficulties surrounding the practice of digital information conservation and use. We have talked about the almost insurmountable social and technical issues that need to be addressed in order to implement a system that could successfully meet the needs of users. UC Berkeley has examined these issues and has developed a service called the Media Vault Program (MVP) which attempts to tackle many of the issues that we are confronting.

The team that Developed the MVP examined the various digital storage strategies for scholarly digital resources that were already in practice around the campus to see how the users interacted with these collections in order to ascertain their needs. Unsurprisingly they found that a large number of users worked with systems that had little metadata consistency, were run by faculty that lacked the skills to manage digital collections or digital infrastructures and had little way of making their digital assets available to others. The Media Vault Program is a campus wide solution to these problems.

The MVP program gives users the tools to up load datasets adjust the permissions and the licensing as necessary for each digital object. The team has created a tiered ingest work flow system that allows the user to prepare media assets in one stage then set them to a submit area. Following submission the assets are available to the user in the Archive section. In this stage the use cannot effect changes to the asset. The user can then publish the asset in websites or galleries or in other forms. This tiered system allows the user to work with their data and not worry about damaging any files.

The collection is backed-up of site. For added and added level of protection. A couple personal favorite functions of the system are; the system assigns permanent URLs (PURL) to the assets and the administrators of the collection assist in the creation of metadata during the ingest process if need be. These two steps should go a long way in assuring that the assets will be locatable.

The MVP group has also developed strategies for managing the data through out its life cycle . This includes data appraisal and preservative storage to encourage reuse.

This Project provides a excellent model to how a comprehensive data storage solution should look. I find it heartening that individual groups (or in this case campuses) are meeting with the problems of digital collections head on. These individual collections will hopefully provide the experience and practice that is need so that we can use the digital deluge rather than be washed away by it.