DRAFT: Digital Collections Strategy =================================== Mission ------- Vision ------ Principles ---------- * Have strong, immediate yet durable interest and research value to the Texas A&M community and beyond * Represent the depth and diversity of the historical and cultural resources of Texas A&M's rare or unique materials. * Provide equitable access to resources of significant value to the Texas A&M community and beyond * Enhance and widen access and use of the Library's rare and unique collections * Promote discoverability and provide context for thoughtfully curated collections * Respect intellectual property rights * Understand and address ethical concerns as they arise * Create accurate rights statements and apply licenses where appropriate (probably another category) * Ensure users have the information they need to use our works responsibly * Follow CARE principals * Promote the use of digital collections in new research and creative activity * Ensure our initiatives flourish by creating and supporting sustainable solutions and software * Adhere to digitization and metadata best practice standards Objectives and Tactics ---------------------- =========================== Expand Discovery and Access =========================== *Make our unique digital collections discoverable and accessible where our users are* * Increase discoverability, availability, and accessibility of digital works * Develop workflows and create closed captioning files for all video works served to our users. * Develop workflows to create transcriptions of handwritten text documents. * Develop workflows to create and reuse OCR for typed works. * Increase visibility and usability of hidden collections * Identify "hidden" digital collections that are online but are missing minimal description * Develop workflows to automate the generation of minimal descriptive metadata * Improve discoverability of works and collections in search engines and external services * Investigate current SEO of collections are develop plans to improve across digital collections * Enable interoperability and discovery of assets across collections * Develop workflows to to make collections discoverable in VuFind * Develop a single discovery interface for works from all digital collections ============================================================== Optimize Services, Improve Governance, and Strengthen Capacity ============================================================== *Enhance documentation, microservices, and workflows to increase use and output and meet the needs of our users* * Continue to adopt open standards to promote interoperability * Build applications and microservices using international, open standards (IIIF, OCFL, W3C, etc.) * Participate in international standards governance to ensure the needs of the university community are met * Streamline workflows for import and ingest of new collections * Develop decision tree that informs when a particular digital assets management is used * Develop application or procedures to automate ingests and free up developer time * Improve manifest creation for works from digital assets management systems * Develop new and improve existing governance framework * Create and adopt a new strategic vision for digital collections with a clear mission state, principles, and goals * Using the Libraries and Cushing's collection development policy, create a collection development policy for digital collections * Create content models that inform how works should be presented in applications * Acknowledge efforts and give CRediT ============== Measure Impact ============== *Understand use and improve the impact of our initiatives* * Develop program to collect and regularly review usage stats * Assess user needs and address initiatives appropriately ========================== Empower Research and Reuse ========================== *Empower researchers to leverage our collections in their own creative activity* * Encourage computational use fo digitized and born digital collections * Create and make accessible computational datasets for our works and collections * Package text and transcripts related to digital collections and works in easily understandable ways * Develop, provide access to, and support responsible computational use of collections as data * Apply accurate rights and licenses based on RightsStatements.org, Creative Commons, Open Data Commons, and Traditional Knowledge Notices * Consider and develop adequate safeguards against improper usage, detrimental loss of context, and the amplification of biases in Artificial Intelligence * Identify stakeholders and understand needs * Reduce barriers to use * Lower barriers to use and reuse of collections * Create and share documentation on how to access collections as data * Publicize Open APIs and other pathways that enable reuse * Provide public access to governing documentation to increase understandability (Metadata, Governance, everything) Things to Include / Consider Including -------------------------------------- * Mission * Vision * Principles * Objectives * Workflows, policies, and practices for recommendation, identification, selection, acquisition, description, processing, preservation, and access of born digital content for the Library’s collection * Further development of the Library’s technical infrastructure to support the full digital content lifecycle * Development of various access policies and procedures appropriate to different categories of digital content * Training and development of staff * Align with strategies at Cushing, the Libraries, and the greater campus community