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: Steve Marks, Digital Preservation Librarian, University of Toronto (steve.marks AT utoronto.ca).

Note: Any documents that are posted in a members-only area of the OCUL website or SPOT-Docs wiki *shouldn't* be re-posted in this wiki space.

 

Members List

Activity Plan

  • Work with OCUL membership on 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.

  • Work with OCUL membership on opportunities for shared infrastructure (e.g, platforms and tools such as Islandora, Hydra, Archivematica or methods for cross­-institution discovery of digital content). Where support for shared infrastructure is identified, serve as point of contact with OCUL Standing Committees around proposal/implementation details.)

  • Work with OCUL membership on consortially negotiated support for digitization of complex formats (e.g., audiovisual recordings, and maps). These formats generally require specialized equipment not found in OCUL institutions. Where support for shared infrastructure is identified, serve as a point of contact with OCUL Standing Committees.

  • Hold a reoccurring event 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, summit-­type event, and/or a day focused on a specific topic.

Work Plans

  • 2013-2014
  • 2014-2015

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

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!

Digitization Dreams! - What would you love to digitize at your organization.

Mailing List

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

Resources

Policies, procedures, and best practices documents

Digital Curation Bibliography

Member List

 

Recent space activity

Space contributors