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. Through the YDC, ODAI facilitates this collaboration and coordination by bringing together partners -- to develop common practices and policies, integrate and share digital media content, build a shared core infrastructure, and implement policies to support digital initiatives at Yale.

Core Principles of Yale Digital Commons

• Actively engage creators, users, producers, and managers of digital content.
• Encourage appropriate sharing of digital content across the University.
• Collaborate to identify shared outcomes and to support common needs.
• Respect domain differences while sharing common infrastructure.
• Improve sustainability of technical solutions through larger-scale adoptions.
• Share best practices.
• Eliminate redundant efforts.
• Ensure end-of-life migration plans.

The key technological tools for the YDC include a powerful digital asset management system, highly reliable mass storage, a cross-collections aggregation and discovery service, a permanent linking service, and digital preservation services.

MEDIA MANAGEMENT ENVIRONMENT:
The OpenText Digital Asset Management (DAM) system is a core component of the YDC. The DAM -- Yale's media managment environment, streamlines digital media work processes and work management, organizes audio-video assets in a shared repository with documents and images to ensure that they can be easily maintained and accessed by professional staff, provide consistent methods to support fulfillment of patron requests for specific versions of digital audio-video materials and supports distribution of these assets to publishing venues and dissemination channels

PERSISTENT LINKING SERVICES:
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.

STORAGE:
Secure and abundant storage environments are a challenge for all organizations creating and storing digital content. All of the museums and libraries at Yale are partners in the acquisition and use of the Isilon mass storage solution that ODAI implemented with ITS in August 2009. It has been integrated with the DAM to support large-scale digital staging areas for the project partners and to support digital preservation. This shared environment reduces the overall support cost to the university. A tape storage solution is currently being planned that will leverage major university investments in storage environments for the sciences in support of cultural heritage content.

SEARCH, RETRIEVAL AND OPEN ACCESS:
The content of the YDC is now available through the Discover Yale Digital Content gateway.  This massive search and retrieval service also supports the recently adopted policy on open access to all digital representations of works in the public domain from museum, library, and archive collections at Yale University.

DIGITAL PRESERVATION:
A coherent, timely, and economically efficient program for persistent access to Yale's digital assets is built into the YDC. The service level guide documents the complex requirements of digital preservation and creates a tiered set of services, and a YDC “hybrid” bit-level preservation repository will be the first iteration of a production system to meet the baseline requirements (service level 1) for digital preservation at Yale.

COMMUNITY, COLLABORATION, COMMUNICATION:

• The Advisory Group to the YDC, with representation from each of the YDC program partners, provides strategy, planning, and prioritization to the wider University community.
• The YDC Forum provides continuing engagement with digital content producers and stewards across the entire institution.
• The YDC Implementation Working Group supports the ongoing progress of adapting the enterprise grade digital asset management system into Yale practice.
• YDC partners include the Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum, Yale University Library, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Office of Digital Dissemination is the most recent addition to the YDC and is currently collaborating to develop digital audio and video management capacity.