Duke Dartmouth Project
Jeffrey Horrell, Dean of Libraries at Dartmouth
Both expressed concerns about grappling extraordinary amount of digital information. Services were starting to appear to deal with some parts of the content (journal articles), but that’s only a small piece of the information. What is the role of research libraries in managing this content? Based on conversations with Don Waters, received a joint planning grant and then individual grants to approach questions. Annual advisory council meetings, including colleagues at Chicago, Virginia, Williams, Yale, and others.
Deborah Jakubs – University Librarian, Duke
Both institutions saw, at the start, isolated efforts to manage digital information. Because of decentralization neither institution was able previously to develop infrastructure to straddle both academic and administrative realms. This effort has begun to overcome that issue. Frequent communication to faculty about the value of a coherent approach to digital preservation is important.
Paolo Mangiafico – Director of Digital Information Strategy, Duke
Context: in 2006 one year joint planning project between Duke and Dartmouth. Better understand landscape of digital assets on both campuses. Resulted in a report. Identified challenges: insufficient funding for new infrastructure and support; lack of established models; distributed and independent culture that is hard to change. No one size fits all asset management system. Project about practices and services, nurturing an ecosystem, not implementing a system. Ask faculty to tell us what they want and build around that, not institutional needs.
Faculty wanted collaboration, publishing, and impact. Publishing in terms of getting things out there quickly for people to see that are not ephemeral.
Toolkits and support for:
- Managing and organizing their own stuff in ays that make sense
- Dissminating what they’re creating
- collaboration using modern net tools
- informal and formal publication
- metadata standards, taxonomies,
- data on how stuff is actually used
- place to hand off data/publications when it’s done.
Tiers of custodianship
- Formal publication and archiving (institutional repositories) – selection for institutional value
- Informal publication and mediated management (research repositories) – self archiving, curation by data owners with consulting. permanent urls, basic metadata
- Basic storage and management (personal repositories) – auto-extracted metadata
selection and filtering processes between boundaries. services at those boundaries.
Process and governance
– provost level steering committee, plus task groups. Decided to focus fist on academic materials, so governing group mostly faculty. A limited term task force – the digital futures task force. Seven faculty, plus a handful of staff. members nominated by deans.
Roadmap and potential projects. task force decided which to prioritize. Decided to start at top of pyramid and work down. in first year developed an open access policy and repository and publication management services for faculty. Mostly managed by library. Developing an experts database based on vivo ontoloty.
In second year, worked on research data management support.
Both efforts received significant attention on campus, including discussing with board of trustees.
Choice architecture – influenced by Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. set defaults for what you want outcome to be, but allow people to opt out. That’s how they’ve been developing services for digital asset management. Will encourage culture change better than mandates.
Stephen McAllister – Dartmouth
Dartmouth Digital Initiative (D2I)
Protect core digital information. Guide transition from paper to digital.
Committee included counsel, libraries, CIO, VP of Research, College records manager, Director of HR and payroll, Associate Librarian for Info Management and the Director of Digital Info Strategy. Met every other week.
What is strategy? (per Henry Mintzberg) – Deliberate and emergent strategies. Combination of intended strategy and emergent strategies (what happens when it hits reality – what people are really doing). Need a model that can incorporate emerging behaviors.
Vision included governance, culture, and technology – decided to tackle governance first. Wanted institutional representation across the the whole institution. Used existing faculty councils. Digital Asset Strategy Committee includes – CIO, CFO, Dean of Libraries, Director – Dean of College, Dean of Faculty, Prof. Schools reps, VP Research, Advancement. Individuals on that committee also liase to faculty committees. First task – Info Security policy approval. 1.5 year process, led by a former CISO at Pfizer. Went to faculty councils and then to governance group for approval. Have recently been talking about cloud policy. Most recently working on Institutional Repository – strong on admin systems, strong on infrastructure, fewer tools in academic area. Engaged Ithaka to report on: peer institutions, benefits, defining the content, implications of our decisions, readiness, process.
Oren Sreebny 