ARTstor – a Mellon-funded initiative to enhance scholarship, teaching, and learning in the arts through digital technology – is collaborating with Yale University (ODAI) and eight other institutions on the development of Shared Shelf, an enterprise-level web platform for creating, managing and sharing digital image collections.
With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Research in Information Technology Program, ConservationSpace was launched as a project to develop an open-source software application that will address a core need of the conservation community for a shared solution to the problem of documentation management. The conservation community has long recognized that a digital approach to managing its documentation would improve continuity in procedures, increase access, expand research opportunities, and better ensure the preservation of its documents.
Cross Collection Discovery (CCD) provides a framework for Discover Yale Digital Content – a new collaborative service that allows a single faceted search and discovery of related content held by different campus units. This shared common infrastructure for harvesting metadata and delivering digital content will enable future lifecycle management and growth of assets within Yale's Digital Ecosystem.
The rapid growth in the scale of research data has vastly increased the challenge of managing data effectively to enable analysis and to drive discovery. Data curation, a lifecycle approach to data management, helps ensure data integrity, adds value, and facilitates reuse. ODAI is developing recommendations for a data curation program that will allow Yale, over time, to leverage shared infrastructure to drive common practices in data curation that support data management in active research, publication, citation, access, and reuse.
Long-term access to digital content is an essential component of stewardship; however, digital content can be susceptible to loss, corruption, and obsolescence. In collaboration with digital content stakeholders across the university, the Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI) has been developing a strategy for institution-wide life cycle management of digital content that includes preservation. This strategy is as much about policy as it is about technology.
The academic community at Yale and elsewhere has always recognized the documentary and evidentiary value of photography. At Yale, photographs quickly became an essential resource for disciplines increasingly focused on the gathering and analysis of data based on observation, both cultural and scientific. Not surprisingly, given the depth and breadth of the University’s activities, the photograph collections have grown systematically over the past century and a half and in collections throughout the campus. A directory of these collections provides essential information for access and management.
Yale University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Irvine, are collaborating on a four year research project, from October 1, 2008 to September 30, 2012, to investigate how topic models can improve access to digital library and museum collections. The project is supported by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Institutional Repository (IR) is a powerful new service for academic campuses to collect, manage, and provide access to its digitally-produced scholarship in a technologically sustainable system. ODAI is coordinating the development and implementation of an IR for Yale University with faculty, librarians, and other stakeholders.
Early in the initial planning for digital content infrastructure at Yale, ODAI, in collaboration with the Libraries, Museums, and Information Technology Systems, understood that mass storage would be an essential component of the infrastructure needed to address the rapidly expanding volume of digital content at Yale.
Digital media, consisting of images, audio, video, and documents have become integral to Yale’s tripartite mission to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge. The Yale Media Management Environment (aka DAM) provides a phased approach to building shared infrastructure to facilitate the creation, use, and reuse of digital media content across the academic landscape.
The images of places, people, and events produced through the Office of Public Affairs and Communications (OPAC) constitute a rich collection of Yale’s history. This project will provide a sustainable solution for the management, dissemination, and long-term stewardship of OPAC’s extensive image collections by moving it to the university's Media Management Environment.
In the web environment, change happens rapidly and continuously. Links to resources break frequently as content is moved from server to server. Citations and references that depend upon a link can be compromised if that link is broken. A persistent linking service is an important component of any digital content management environment. It allows systems and people to link digital content with the assurance that the link will properly resolve to the content, even if that content has been moved. Many of Yale’s digital services such as the Library’s Orbis electronic catalog, Cross Collection Discovery, and other various digital repositories rely on the Yale Persistent Linking Service (YPLS) to maintain millions of persistent links pointing to Yale’s valuable digital assets.
The ODAI sponsored Research Data Task Force (RDTF) has completed its charge to undertake a research data requirements analysis as a method of articulating the current landscape, existing services, and service gaps related to digital research data. The Final Report of the task force is now available.
The digital age presents unprecedented opportunities to increase awareness of and access to Yale’s knowledge and assets, now and for future generations. Through digital dissemination we have the means to increase the impact the University can have on the world today. To this end, creative digital initiatives have evolved throughout the campus units and in the academic community. To further support that creativity in the future, we should find ways to spend less of our limited time on the means of production and more on the outcome. Shared practices and infrastructure in production processes and tools will provide greater efficiency, reduce redundancy, improve quality, enable wider access, and aid in preservation.
The West Campus Digital Core is part of an evolving program to make Yale's culture heritage collections more accessible through digitization, development, and digital curation. The digital age has profoundly altered academia with its new teaching, learning, and research opportunities, and this planned state-of-the art facility at West Campus is a key component of Yale's mission to conserve, digitize, store, study, and disseminate its vast collections of art, artifacts, natural history, and documentary holdings.
The Yale Digital Commons (YDC) is a campus-wide collaboration to develop shared infrastructure for the creation, management and dissemination of the expansive digital asset collections at Yale. YDC substantiates the digital ecosystem metaphor – it embodies the complex relationships between people, practice, technology, and content requisite in today's digital information environment, and it recognizes the importance of moving away from departmental information silos and cultivating a holistic digital environment instead.
