Collaboration

In this edition of the Insights Interview series for the NDSA Innovation Working Group, I was excited to talk with Bradley Daigle, director of digital curation services and digital strategist for special collections at the University of Virginia, and R. F. (Chip) German Jr., program director of the APTrust, about the Academic Preservation Trust.

Lauren: Tell us about the Academic Preservation Trust and how the organization addresses the needs of member institutions.

The National Library of New Zealand has selected OCLC to host Te Puna Services, a collection of online tools and services created with New Zealand librarians to support daily workflows in searching, cataloguing, resource sharing and managing collections.

OCLC has previously had an agreement in place with the National Library to host Te Puna interlibrary loan services. By selecting OCLC to host and manage these other services, the National Library will significantly reduce its administrative workload and maintenance tasks.

Video Published on 2 Sep 2015
Sometimes you just can’t do it alone. In this session, we’ll review some of the existing networks and collaborative projects that are available to help you preserve your digital materials. We’ll also discuss ways you can partner with other institutions in your area to improve your chances for preservation success without spending a lot of money.

Volume 39, Number 2, June juin 2015 pp. 235-244

Why might geography matter to the future of libraries?

Today we are featuring a guest post from an important member of the Omeka community, Jess Waggoner. She has led the creation of the Grateful Dead Archive Online and several Omeka plugins. Here, she writes about her and her team’s experiences building the Grateful Dead Archive Online with Omeka, lessons learned about that project and the needs of a large institutional library’s data coordination and workflow management, and plugins that reflect that work.

Through the expertise of many, we can leverage success for the collaborative was the guiding philosophy as members of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries considered how we might utilize technology and software to join our digital collections enabling access to a wealth of collections. In 2013, members of the Alliance were struggling to develop and support digital collections in a variety of formats. Librarians were unsure how to handle video, photos, books, and learning objects that seemed to mushroom overnight with rising and uncontrolled costs.

Issuing the Recommended Format Specifications

Five years ago, Europeana’s very first White Paper, by Prof. Stefan Gradmann, discussed the idea of Europeana as a knowledge graph, formed with metadata on cultural objects augmented with a so-called “semantic layer”. The aim then was to position Europeana and its data partners as a source of contextual knowledge that everyone could exploit to access digitised European heritage. To achieve this, the white paper advocated the design of an advanced data model, re-using existing pieces of web technology.

For most of us, climbing the corporate ladder means first becoming a manager. Then, as your control extends over bigger teams, and eventually entire departments, you ascend in an organization’s hierarchy. Your career advancement therefore—in terms of title, pay and recognition—is inextricably tied to people management.

But does this decades-old approach to career development even make sense?