Terms of Reference

The OCUL Digital Curation Community will bring together OCUL members who have roles in supporting preservation and access to digitized and born digital materials. The scope of this conversation is envisioned as encompassing the full digital curation lifecycle: including digital object creation/digitization, preservation, and the facilitation of access.

The impetus for the OCUL Digital Curation Community comes from the OCUL Digital Curation Summit at York University in May, 2013. There was a clear desire among summit participants for opportunities to share knowledge, experience, work being done at our institutions, and occasions for collaboration. As such, this will be the initial focus of the community. It is also anticipated that the community will serve as a sounding board for issues around digital curation, and provide advice for curation focused activities within OCUL.

As digital curation activities are core to the OCUL mission, this is envisioned as an ongoing community.

Membership

Membership to the OCUL Digital Curation Community is open to all OCUL member institutions. Community membership is at the discretion of each institution and may include more than one person from an institution.

For more information or to become involved contact Community Moderator: Nick Ruest, Digital Assets Librarian, York University (ruestn@yorku.ca)

Work Plan

2013-2014

  • Create an email distribution list to foster communication and information sharing across OCUL institutions.
     
  • Build on the work begun at OCUL Digital Curation Summit by providing members with an open wiki space to share information about work that they have underway; work that they hope to undertake and opportunities for collaboration; policies, procedures, and best practices documents; specialized equipment at their institutions that could be made available to other OCUL libraries; a bibliography of available works on digital curation; and other related information of interest to the larger OCUL digitization community.
     
  • Hold a recurring event (see budget) focused on digitization and digital curation to provide an opportunity to share knowledge and experience, and to network with colleagues across institutions. This could be a broad, summit­type event, and/or a day focused on a specific topic. In consideration of the logistics of this event, please see the attached budget document.
     
  • Identify, from consultation with the OCUL membership, opportunities for training in digital curation and preservation. These could be programs led by people in OCUL libraries or by other experts on a particular topic. Areas such as digital forensics and data curation, for example, are taking on importance in digital preservation work; few OCUL institutions have expertise in this area, and arranging training for a single institution may be cost prohibitive.
     
  • Identify, from consultation with the OCUL membership, opportunities for shared infrastructure (e.g., platforms and tools such as Islandora, Hyrdra, Archivematica or methods for cross­institution discovery of digital content). Where support for shared infrastructure is identified, serve as point of contact with OCUL Standing Committees around proposal/implementation details.
     
  • Identify, from consultation with OCUL membership, opportunities for consortially­negotiated support for digitization of complex formats such as film, audiovisual recordings, and maps. These formats generally require specialized equipment not found in OCUL institutions. Where support for shared infrastructure is identified, serve as point of contact with OCUL Standing Committees around proposal/implementation details.

Meetings and Meet-ups

Information about upcoming and past Community meetings and events

Community

Who is Digitizing What? - Help reduce duplication of effort and coordinate digitization of fragmented collections

Who's Got What Gear? - Help institutions with hardware needs find institutions who have a piece of said hardware.

Tool Shed -

Digital Curation Tool Shed - What institutions have evaluated/tried/used what software tools and what did they think of them?

OCUL Magical Ghost - OCUL has contacted these institutions on behalf of the archival community. If you want to get in touch with them to get best practice, use equipment, or maybe you have a collection they might be interested in, you can get in touch!

Mailing List

To subscribe please email the Community Moderator or ocul@ocul.on.ca.

Resources

Policies, procedures, and best practices documents

Digital Curation Bibliography

 

Recent space activity

Space contributors