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University of Sheffield National Fairground Archive Elevator Pitch
| Section | Content |
|---|---|
| Who | I'm in the process of completing a Masters in Digital Library Management; my background prior to that was in the operations of a commercial digital media archive. I'm really interested in the issues surrounding the creation and ongoing management of digital media collections, and throughout my course here I've been trying to focus on how the University approaches these processes. |
| What | Specifically: the extent to which our special collections exist in digital form, the guidelines we've been following whilst digitising them, and the strategic frameworks we have in place for future-proofing them. This is known as 'Digital Preservation', and the consensus is that it should play a central role in all instituitons' approaches to their stewardship of digital resources. It seems to me that perhaps we might be missing a trick in this area. In digital form, these unique resources of ours not only become easily significantly more accessible to our own researchers, but we gain the option of opening them up online to the global community of interested researchers. |
| Why | The NFA has recently acquired a powerful new web-facing catalogue tool, which provides a perfect framework on which to build a robust digital preservation framework, potentially extensible to all our digital collection. However, I'm not sure we currently have the staff resourcing to effectively achieve this at the moment, and to really engage with the emerging frameworks of best practice in the digitisation and digital preservation of special collections. |
| Goal | I really believe the University should create a new, permanent, Digital Collections Officer core-funded post - to ensure that we get the maximum Return On Investment on our unique collections and new cataloge tool, and to make sure that our collections are safe-guarded for both our own and all researchers, both now and into the future. Needless to say, I'd be very keen to apply for the job myself. |