Perspectives on Preservation Strategies for Digital Content: Lessons Learned

This panel will discuss Texas Tech University Digital Library’s experiences with preservation in the past eight years including failures and near-misses that caused TTU to seek a better system. This all-encompassing system influences all processes of digitization from scanning, metadata creation, online display, and to long term storage maintenance.

Discussion will include how we created policies and procedures for handling a variety of materials (including scanning resolution and file type) and a file naming system and folder structure. Other topics will include: balancing work on new collections while correcting older collection, managing a growing digital preservation system when few understand what you are doing or why, reaching out to the university community about preservation needs, and staying a step ahead of our current technology to ensure that we make fully informed preservation and migration decisions.

The panel will be comprised of two librarians who were a part of the creation of the TTU Digital Library, two who were hired at the mid-point, and two recent hires; thus, giving varied perspectives on the collections and preservation issues. The panel will be in a “talk-show” format with prepared questions and discussions, and then opened for questions from the audience.