On September 18th, 2008, Provost Andrew Hamilton announced the creation of the Office of Digital assets and Infrastructure (ODAI):

Following the advice of the two campus committees (Digital Landscapes and Digital Dissemination) and the University Council Committee on Digital Yale, the ODAI will support the University in several important ways:

• Yale needs to build the digital asset management infrastructure to provide even broader access to our collections, including digital renderings of materials in our libraries, museums, and other special collections.

• Yale University has unique and important legacy collections of audio and video recordings of music, plays, exhibits, and oral histories and testimonies that are on deteriorating media in need of preservation through digitization and the management of life-cycle issues.

• Yale faculty and researchers need institutional support for the deposit, retrieval, and preservation of their publications and research.

Yale will be making a significant commitment to develop the infrastructure necessary to support the creation and organization of our intellectual assets, which, in turn, will enable robust access to, and dissemination of, those assets, both on and off campus.  Development of a virtual content repository is the 21st century extension of Yale’s investment in, and support of, its great physical collections of books, manuscripts, art, artifacts and audio-visual materials. 

ODAI became an administrative initiative with several important antecedents (see Timeline below) throughout campus but it transcends any one departmental initiative or domain of practice within the University. By the time ODAI was established, significant work was being done to understand the impact of the digital landscape on teaching and research on campus and beyond. Faculty, funding agencies, executive administration, and even councils of alumni increasingly called for greater integration of collections and improved infrastructure to support the collections in the digital environment at Yale.

Early leadership came from ITS in the form of the Digital Landscapes Group that was led by Phil Long, CIO, with the objective to develop an understanding of ‘meta’ level, institution-wide commonalities to form a base for integrated approaches to digital landscape development, system evaluation, and planning.

The Library strategic planning process initiated by University Librarian Alice Prochaska in 2002, called for the creation of an Integrated Access Program to enable digital activities to permeate core functions in the University Library through a managed organizational structure that valued communication and openness to improvement. The program was to unite proliferating independent digital initiatives through adherence to core principles created and adopted by the community, ensure full and enduring access to the entire range of library resources regard-less of format through seamless interfaces and a systematic preservation pro-gram, and encourage entrepreneurial initiatives that can evolve into sustainable core services through exploration and development of reliable practices.

Several important recommendations came from this program, including the recommendations for the development of an Institutional Repository.

In the fall of 2002, the Provost Alison Richard commissioned an inventory of digital activity at Yale to identify the key issues raised by the burgeoning digital content outputs. The primary purpose was to contribute to a fuller understanding of Yale’s digital landscape in order to aid the University in its planning for the future. The inventory confirmed that digital projects at Yale were increasing in number, primarily to support classroom instruction, and that they could be found in every department of the University. These digital projects represented a diverse set of practices and had few if any standardized practices that considered long-term access. Digital projects were seen as vehicles for intra-institutional collaboration. None of the digital projects had permanent funding.

The first formal faculty committee convened at Yale to examine the impact of the digital technologies and content was the Provost’s Advisory Committee on Digital Landscapes, charged by Provost Andy Hamilton and chaired by Deputy Provost Barbara Shailor. From fall 2005 to spring 2007, the committee, consisting of faculty and key representatives from ITS, the Library, the Museums, focused on collecting information from members of the Yale community about needs, concerns and aspirations with respect to information technology. In addition to a review of the current state of the digital landscape in teaching and learning at Yale, the Committee sponsored a major faculty survey and faculty focus groups to establish the context for its further deliberations. More than 1,000 faculty responded to the survey and 55 faculty participated in six two-hour focus groups (see: Report of the Strategic Review of Yale University Cyberinfrastructure and Services Survey). The primary concerns of the faculty were that that both they and their students needed more and easier access to digital resources, greater integration of search, ensured preservation, and more support services to manage digital tools and content.

This committee also supported a three-year grant received from the Mellon Foundation from October 2004 to June 30, 2008. The initiative, the Collections Collaborative, was sponsored by the Deputy Provost for the Arts. A Steering Committee of four Yale faculty members, three deans/administrators, and representatives from the museums, libraries, and ITS set priorities for the initiative and selected the projects and activities to be funded. The Committee set the following goals:

1. Development of technical systems to provide integrated access for users to collection holdings across repositories
2. Development of research portals and training programs to improve ability of staff and researchers to discover primary source resources at Yale
3. Development of tools and methods for sharing resources across repositories to expedite the processing and availability of Yale collections
4. Development of a sustainable structure through which Yale repositories can discuss issues of common concern, share information, and develop collaborative programs and projects

Sustainability of the collaboration was the ultimate vision of the grant and in the final report, the Provost’s Office made the commitment to continue the work that the Collections Collaborative began to establish a university-wide, central capacity, thus setting in motion a means for Yale to implement a sustainable structure through which all its repositories could discuss and resolve issues of common concern, share information, and develop collaborative programs and projects. (Final report)

Collections Collaborative: http://www.yale.edu/collections_collaborative/about.html

Sixteen representatives of various Yale libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) met on October 31, 2007 for a day-long meeting to discuss collaborative opportunities involving collecting entities at these repositories. RLG Programs (now OCLC) facilitated the discussion as part of an investigation into library, archive and museum collaboration. Yale University was selected, along with The Smithsonian Institution, Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh and the Victoria and Albert Museum to each host a day-long meeting on-site with RLG staff and a facilitator. RLG and the participating institutions were to explore opportunities to deepen existing library, archive and museum collaborations, and identify new areas for joint work. Reports were prepared and shared with campus colleagues and administration.

In Yale’s report, workshop participants agreed that a more strategic advocacy approach was needed on behalf of Yale collections. They recommended the creation of a “Yale Federation of Collections” to address some aspects of the University’s administrative structure that presented challenges for LAM collaborations, including the University’s funding approach and the organizational hierarchy which made the decision-making process difficult to navigate across reporting lines. They concluded that Yale’s collections collaborations to be sustainable, collections must be integrally connected to teaching. However, at that time, efforts to use collections in teaching were relatively modest and they recommended that a dedicated department or other University personnel should work with faculty or teaching instructors on how to use LAM collections for teaching and broader efforts should be encouraged to promote and demonstrate the myriad ways that collections can be integrated into the broader educational mission of the University.

See the OCLC Library, Archive and Museum Collaboration http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/lamsurvey/default.htm

Finally, the Digital Dissemination Task Force began meeting in 2007, convened by the VP and Secretary of the University, Linda Lorimer, to inform her initiative to examine the implications of “Digital Yale” After establishing an alumni advisory committee which met for over two years, a report to the Yale Corporation stated:

Yale intends to position itself to become a leader in this [digital] domain” and we must “invest in our infrastructure to ensure that we are well positioned for future content creation and dissemination... Just as the buildings and staff support the physical campus, Digital Yale must be built on sustainable infrastructure.” March 09 Draft final report of the University Council Committee on Digital Yale, chair Donna L. Dubinsky ‘77BA 

A 21st century approach to building a strategic digital content infrastructure for Yale University must include a plan for sustainability that reflects the values of community effort, is built on technological innovation, and encourages reusability and openness. It requires a substantial and appropriate investment of resources for start-up development, ongoing services, and capital replacement costs.

Sustainable infrastructure is the composite of selective content, agreed upon policies, engagement of stakeholders and experts, enterprise technology platforms, and flexible tools. While other campuses have invested earlier in digital technologies, Yale is a leader in transcending the 20th century tendency to build isolated silos of digital content. With the creation of ODAI, Yale models a new and comprehensive approach to content cyberinfrastructure that supports the interconnectedness of scientific and humanistic exploration through interoperability, extensibility, reuse, management and user-focus and through a commitment to integration with the larger social community of researchers, teachers, learners, and consumers of knowledge and information in digital form.