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