Making Digital Curation a Systematic Institutional Function

Over the past decade, a rich body of research and practice has emerged under the rubrics of electronic records, digital preservation and digital curation. Most of this work has taken place as research activity (often financed by government agencies) within libraries and information/computer science departments. Many projects focus on one format of information, such as research publications or data, potentially de-contextualizing individual records. Meanwhile, most institutional archives and manuscript repositories, which possess a rich theoretical and practical framework for preserving context among mixed analog materials, have failed to extend their capabilities to digital records. As a result, relatively few institutions have implemented systematic methods to capture, preserve and provide access to the complete range of documentation that end users need to understand and interpret past human activity. The Practical E-Records Method attempts to address this problem by providing easy-to-implement software reviews, guidance/policy templates, and program recommendations that blend digital curation research findings with traditional archival processes and workflows. Using the method discussed in this paper, archives and manuscript repositories can use existing resources to incrementally develop digital curation skills, building a collaborative, expanding program in the process. Archival programs that make digital curation a systematic institutional function will systematically gather, preserve, and provide access to genres of documentation that are contextually-rich and highly susceptible to loss, complementing efforts undertaken by librarians, information scientists and external service providers. Over the next year, the suggested techniques will be tested and refined at the University of Illinois Archives and possibly elsewhere. 1 This paper is based on the paper given by the author at the 6th International Digital Curation Conference, December 2010; received December 2010, published March 2011. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. ISSN: 1746-8256 The IJDC is published by UKOLN at the University of Bath and is a publication of the Digital Curation Centre. 140 Making Digital Curation On November 19, 2009, over 1,000 emails and 3,000 other private documents that had been stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were uploaded to a web server in Russia and immediately mirrored across the Internet (Anon., 2010b). Bloggers, journalists, political operatives, government officials and scientists expressed a wide range of opinions concerning these records and the manner in which they were acquired. No consensus emerged regarding what the documents demonstrated concerning the research practices of atmospheric scientists, much less global temperature trends (Monbiot, 2010). But what if the scientists in question had subsequently placed all of their private records into a publicly available research archives? Whatever one thinks of the case for global warming, the “Climategate” controversy has shown that individuals will go to great lengths to procure content-rich documents, particularly when they believe the records will provide evidence of malfeasance. It also demonstrates that individuals and institutions work against society’s interest (not to mention their own) when they try to selectively preserve information to their liking (Pearce, 2010). Even the perception that a party has fabricated or misrepresented evidence will undermine public confidence in his or her conclusions (Crook, 2010). For this reason, individuals and institutions must carefully plan to preserve (or appropriately dispose of) all materials related to a project or activity based on an assessment of the legal, administrative and historical value of the records. This includes electronic materials. Individuals, institutions, and society as a whole need an accurate, complete and usable record of human activities, and an appropriate legal and institutional framework in which to use that record. Without a trustworthy record, people and institutions cannot make informed decisions, verify existing information, evaluate evidence, hold others accountable, construct accurate histories or develop new knowledge. An authentic record does not preserve itself, and even the best-intentioned records creators often lack the resources or expertise to act as permanent custodians for non-current records. Nor can we rely on those who provide the service of temporarily storing and transmitting records to permanently preserve an interpretable record of human activity.