The National Archives has announced its grant awards for historical records projects, including those for digitization and electronic records management and preservation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Digitizing historical records grants, totaling $420,000, went to four projects: the University of Florida will digitize and make available more than 36,000 pages of diaries and manuscripts from the end of the Colonial period to the beginnings of the modern state; Princeton University will digitize more than 400,000 pages of six Cold War-related manuscript collections; Harvard University will digitize 189,074 pages, covering four generations of the Blackwell Family from 1784 to 1981, that cover abolition, temperance, women's suffrage, and education; and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation in Springfield, Illinois, will digitize the records of Richard Yates, Sr., governor of Illinois 1861-1865.

Three Electronic Records grants, totaling $235,000, went to: the Council of State Archivists for a two-year project to strengthen the capacity of states and territories to manage and preserve electronic records; an electronic records start-up project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York; and a planning grant for the Missouri Office of the Secretary of State to establish an electronic records archives.

| Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications | Digital Scholarship |

Martin J. Gengenbach A has self-archived his Master's theses "'The Way We Do It Here': Mapping Digital Forensics Workflows in Collecting Institutions."

Here's an excerpt:

The study presented in this paper used semi-structured interviews with archivists and curators to investigate the implementation of digital forensics practices for managing born-digital content in collecting institutions. . . . High-level workflow models based on the information gathered through those interviews provide additional documentation and context for archives and special collections seeking to develop their own processes

| Digital Curation Resource Guide | Digital Scholarship |

The EUDAT project has released the EUDAT Sustainability Plan.

Here's an excerpt:

We survey the current provision of infrastructure and long-term data archival services in Europe and review recent efforts to assess the costs involved in preserving research data (Chapters 1 to 4). To focus and constrain sustainability planning, we introduce a number of candidate guiding principles for EUDAT (Chapter 5) and suggest an overall logical model of its future shape, and a number of possible mechanisms for realising this model (Chapter 6). We discuss possible mechanisms to define levels of service and provide funding for a future EUDAT CDI, and introduce our intent to measure actual costs of delivering EUDAT services through an activity-based cost modelling exercise (Chapters 7 and 8).

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works |

Natsuko Nicholls has self-archived Status and Outlook for University of Michigan Research Profile Data Strategy in Deep Blue.

Here's an excerpt:

My investigation into various faculty expertise efforts and activities across institutions shows that many universities have not yet developed or adopted a centralized, comprehensive university-wide system for expertise data collection and activity reporting. There is still substantial variation in procedures across departments and colleges within institutions and considerable duplication of effort across campus units. However, it is indeed the recent trend that many institutions—including the University of Michigan—have actively engaged in campus-wide discussions about research profile data curation needs, concluding that a more centralized system would provide incentives for timely data-entry, guarantee currency of the expertise data, and increase overall efficiency and data quality. This study also sheds light on the role of the academic library as an important stakeholder in expertise data collection and management. My findings suggest that various attributes of an academic library make it an ideal driver for research profile data management. The academic library is a strong resource for information technology expertise as well as information management and dissemination at any institution. Further, it tends to be a neutral and trusted entity, especially with employees who regularly engage with researchers and have a good understanding of the academic landscape and the needs of the research community. In addition to providing an overview of the research landscape where profiling needs are quickly rising and where benefits from a well-managed profile data system are widely understood, this study also illuminates the conventional use of expertise databases and research networking/discovery tools as well as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS).

| Research Data Curation Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Joanna Barwick has self-archived her doctoral thesis, "Where Have All the Games Gone? An Exploratory Study of Digital Game Preservation," in the Loughborough University Institutional Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Investigating the relationship of games to culture; reviewing current preservation activities and drawing conclusions about the value of digital games and the significance of their preservation were the study's objectives. These have been achieved through interviews with key stakeholders—the academic community, as potential users of collections; memory institutions, as potential keepers of collections; fan-based game preservation experts; and representatives from the games industry. In addition to this, case studies of key game preservation activities were explored.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works |

Jeonghyun Kim, Edward Warga, and William Moen have published "Digital Curation in the Academic Library Job Market" in ASIST 2012: Proceedings of the 75th ASIS&T Annual Meeting.

Here's an excerpt:

This study of job advertisements for academic library positions is one activity of a current capacity building project, Information: Curate, Archive, Manage, Preserve (iCAMP). In this project, we are developing a four-course masters level curriculum for digital curation and data management. It deploys a competency-based curriculum approach (Moen, Kim, Warga, Wakefield, & Halbert, 2011). This analysis of job advertisements was carried out to identify and define knowledge, skills, and abilities as a part of the competency development process.

|Digital Scholarship |

Joan E. Beaudoin has published "Context and Its Role in the Digital Preservation of Cultural Objects" in the latest issue of D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

In discussions surrounding digital preservation, context—those properties of an object related to its creation and preservation that make the object's origins, composition, and purpose clear—has been identified as a critical aspect of preservation metadata. Understanding a cultural object's context, in as much detail as possible, is necessary to the successful future use of that object, regardless of its form. The necessity of capturing data about the creation of digital resources and the technical details of the preservation process, has generally been agreed. Capturing many other contextual aspects—such as utility, history, curation, authenticity—that would certainly contribute to successful retrieval, assessment, management, access, and use of preserved digital content, has not been adequately addressed or codified. Recording these aspects of contextual information is especially important for physical objects that are digitally preserved, and thereby removed from their original setting. This paper investigates the various discussions in the literature surrounding contextual information, and then presents a framework which makes explicit the various dimensions of context which have been identified as useful for digital preservation efforts, and offers a way to ensure the capture those aspects of an object's context that are often missed.

|Digital Scholarship |

The School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is now offering a Post-Masters Certificate in Data Curation.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

With a two-week intensive kick-off on the UNC at Chapel Hill campus during summer session (May 2013), the remainder of the program will be taught online and includes guided projects that arise from a student's work experience. The 30 credit program can be completed in two years.

Defined by Drs. Helen Tibbo, alumni distinguished professor, and Christopher (Cal) Lee, associate professor at SILS, "Digital/data curation involves selection and appraisal by creators and archivists; evolving provision of intellectual access; redundant storage; data transformations; and, for some materials a commitment to long-term preservation. Digital/data curation is stewardship that provides for the reproducibility and re-use of authentic digital data and other digital assets. Development of trustworthy and durable digital repositories; principles of sound metadata creation and capture; use of open standards for file formats and data encoding; and the promotion of information management literacy are all essential to the longevity of digital resources and the success of curation efforts."

|Digital Scholarship |

Presentations from the October 2012 PASIG Meeting are now available.

| Digital Curation Resource Guide | Digital Scholarship |

DuraSpace has received a two-year $861,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop DuraCloud data services.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Currently, DuraCloud provides a reliable way to preserve and archive research materials in the cloud, a solution developed within the academic community for academic institutions. During the next phase of DuraCloud development, additional applications, features, and services will be built to extend the cloud in order to facilitate data archiving and content management. DuraSpace offers DuraCloud as a software as a service that enables archiving, preserving, and managing institutional content using cloud storage and intends to expand its service offerings in the next phase of development.

|Digital Scholarship |

Presentations from the PREMIS Implementation Fair 2012 are now available.

| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |

The UNC School of Information & Library Science has released Curating for Quality: Ensuring Data Quality to Enable New Science.

Here's an excerpt:

The National Science Foundation sponsored a workshop on September 10 and 11, 2012, in Arlington, Virginia on "Curating for Quality: Ensuring Data Quality to Enable New Science." Individuals from government, academic and industry settings gathered to discuss issues, strategies and priorities for ensuring quality in collections of data. This workshop aimed to define data quality research issues and potential solutions. The workshop objectives were organized into four clusters: (1) data quality criteria and contexts, (2) human and institutional factors, (3) tools for effective and painless curation, and (4) metrics for data quality. . . .

The workshop identified several key challenges that include:

• selection strategies—how to determine what is most valuable to preserve
• how much and which context to include—how to insure that data is interpretable and usable in the future, what metadata to include
• tools and techniques to support painless curation—creating and sharing tools and techniques that apply across disciplines
• cost and accountability models—how to balance selection, context decisions with cost constraints.

| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |