When one thinks about research libraries, often the first images that comes to mind are of the vast print collections housed upon miles and miles of shelves. However, libraries also have terabytes and terabytes of digital files. To give you some context, one terabyte equals one million megabytes, and one megabyte is about the size of a photo you might text a friend.
That’s a lot of information to store.
Digital Asset Management (DAM) is an umbrella term that refers to workflows for ingesting, organizing, and storing digital materials so that they are easy to find, retrieve, and access over time. In fact, preserving knowledge for future generations is a core stewardship role of a research library, one that we take very seriously. Storing and preserving digital material is, in many ways, a lot more complicated than storing and preserving print materials. It requires sophisticated technical systems and expertise in information technology, collection development, archival practices, metadata creation, indexing, discovery, and digitization.
To this end, and with the support of University administration, we have embarked on a multi-year project to steward University and library digital assets to ensure continued access to distinctive and valuable collections and data.
There are two types of assets in this project. The first includes items that are unique to the University, such as the thousands of musical scores that are in the public domain from the Eastman School of Music, theses and dissertations, research papers, datasets, technical reports, symposia and conference materials, and institutional and departmental publications. The second type includes those that are created from physical items—typically rare or unique—to protect them from wear and tear or those that are “born digital,” in other words, they did not originate in a physical form. Deploying digital surrogates of rare and unique items essentially extends the life of the original artifact. Examples include letters of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, the world-class AIDS Education Poster Collection, and the digital materials in the Louise M. Slaughter Congressional archive.
Our DAM will provide an intuitive front-end for users to seamlessly gain access to these materials. All of these precious and unique digital assets require careful stewardship. This University-wide project will be led by Lauren Di Monte, associate dean of Learning, Digital and Research Strategies, and her team of library and technology professionals. I am grateful to have their expertise in this massive endeavor. I am also very grateful that our University’s leaders acknowledge the importance of these efforts.
Meliora!
Mary Ann Mavrinac
Vice Provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean
University of Rochester Libraries
