DOT Charge

Background:

The Digital Operations Team, originally formed in March 2009, was born out of a need to streamline the communication and decision-making processes at an operational level for digital library projects and the ongoing maintenance of the Dome system.  Participants were chosen to represent specific roles in the overall project lifecycle.  In the new organization, DOT is an IR cross-functional team that provides a centralized service across the Libraries for digital collections targeted for preservation and access via local repositories (Dome and DSpace@MIT) or external access providers.  Reporting in AMES, its charge is now formalized as follows:

Membership:

Beverly Turner, chair; Carl Jones, Mikki Simon Macdonald, Jennifer Morris, Ann Marie Willer

Charge:

Reporting to the AMES Co-Head for Metadata and Enterprise Systems, the Digital Operations Team is responsible for the oversight, coordination, and integration of the functions and services used to create, manage, and provide access to curated digital library collections. 

To accomplish their charge, the Team as a whole:

  • Establishes and documents standards, best practices, guidelines, workflows, and procedures for creation and ongoing maintenance of digital collections
  • Consults with project sponsors across the Libraries on budget, feasibility, and proposal development for potential digital collections, and with the Office of Scholarly Publishing and Licensing on rights issues and determinations
  • Implements approved projects, working collaboratively with the project sponsor and other Libraries’ staff
  • Coordinates or assigns responsibility for the intellectual control and physical processing of collections prior to scanning
  • Assesses project processes and practices, and looks for ways to improve and standardize procedures
  • Collaborates with the Program Manager for Scholarly Repository Services around DSpace@MIT’s collections and ongoing maintenance
  • Documents their work both to track progress on projects and record the group’s activities, decisions, and recommendations 
  • Shares information relevant to the lifecycle of digital collections
  • Recommends changes to the Dome system to improve functionality or enhance user and/or staff experience

In addition to these shared responsibilities, individual members of the Team have specific responsibility for maintaining and managing aspects of data and/or operations within their functional areas.  Finally, members of the Team act in a liaison role with the other staff in their functional areas.

DOT Operating Principles (DRAFT)

General:

  • These operating principles apply to DSpace@MIT and Dome, including items that are digitized (referred to as born-digital) and those that need to be digitized.
  • There is a two-step nomination process for digital projects including a consultation from DOT.  The purpose of the process is to prevent spending extensive time on developing a project that is ultimately not feasible or fundable. 
  • For most projects, we develop a wiki page to track progress and document decisions.

Selection:

Items selected must be free of any rights issues.  Visit the Office of Scholarly Publication website for copyright information.

These criteria were developed by the DOME Selection Criteria Task Force in 2009 and have been in use since then.

  • Collection development policies apply equally to both physical and digital collections. Collection Managers and Subject Specialists should feel confident selecting content for digital projects using their existing guidelines for physical items. 
  • Candidates for digitization might include the following:** items with unique content** items with content that is applicable to the MIT curriculum** items that have MIT-specific access requirements 
    • items in fragile condition
    • items for which there is current or anticipated heavy use
    • materials in the DDC collection
    • items which would be easier to use or for which use would be enhanced if presented online
    • items associated with “triggers” such as an academic department’s anniversary

Research Publications:

  • Research Publications do not go through the approval process unless it is expected to involve a large expense.
  • Archives would like a due diligence pass at collections that were MIT produced, digitized and ingested into DSpace, and up for withdrawal from the library.

Preservation & Conservation Services:

Digital projects vary greatly in size, scope, and purpose, and correspondingly, the type and amount of preparation required for the materials will also vary by project.  PCS in-house procedures for preparing digital project materials (in use since 2008) are summarized at https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/LIBCMS/Digital+Projects+Procedures. The level of service provided by Preservation & Conservation Services for a digital project will be negotiated as part of the project planning process and may include the following:

  • Preliminary physical assessment of a sample of the project materials to determine their "scan-ability" and to estimate the time and cost associated with physical preparation.
  • Item-by-item physical inspection, assessment, and collation of materials before scanning.  This also serves as a quality control check on the master inventory list.
  • Conservation treatments to ensure good image capture. 
  • Packing of materials to reduce the risk of damage and to meet vendor specifications.
  • Shipping and receiving of materials, communication with vendor.
  • Inspection of returned items for vendor-caused damage, repairs as necessary.
  • Disposition of physical copies (rehousing/rebinding/repair as needed for materials to be stored or circulated, coordination with other library units for withdrawal and discard).

Digitization:

  • No blanket digitization standard is applied to all materials.  Each project has unique characteristics and therefore procedures and standards must be tested, discussed, and agreed upon before digitizing.
  • Missing Pages: if scanned by Document Services, they will include a page in the pdf with the message that the page was missing in the original.
  • OCR will be performed on all typeset items if print quality permits; excluding handwritten text. (Handwritten text usually requires manual transcription.)
  • Image Derivative creation is available as a fee based service from vendors.  Project sponsors may create derivatives on their own if able.
  • File disposition: https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/spaces/gliffy/viewlargediagram.action?name=File Disposition** RDrive:DSpace Images  - the master files will reside in this folder prior to ingestion
    • Download locally for faster work ex. Cataloging - download to work locally then only upload the metadata or derivatives
    • Never overwrite or replace files on RDrive:DSpace Images
      • Exception: When files are damaged or misnamed. Limited number of people who can do this
  • Space requirements: DOT needs to approximate their needs for disk space on the R drive and communicate with IT Core. R:\DspaceImages is used as a staging area for files prior to ingest.
  • OCA scanned files in Internet Archive will also be loaded into our repository.
  • The digital copy for MIT Research Publications is considered one of the “two copies” for the libraries. The disposition of the physical copies is up to the sponsoring library.  Blanket decision? The libraries decision? REQUEST DECISION FROM IRL

File naming:

  • As we create new collections, it is useful if there is consistency in the filenames assigned to digital objects. This document contains a recommended filenaming schema developed in 2008 for use in the MIT Libraries: https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/x/-wIrAQ.  While each collection will impose its own restrictions on file names, following the requirements outlined in this document will ensure basic consistency across collections and make later processing of the files much easier.  In general, we won't change the file names on born-digital material unless the names violate the Requirements and Best Practices in this document.

Metadata:

  • Tom Rosko, Nina Davis-Millis, and a representative from Specialized Content and Services (SCS) will make descriptive and preservation metadata policy decisions. DOT will refer to this group for policy questions.
  • Jolene de Verges, Rob Wolfe, and Mikki Simon MacDonald will make descriptive and preservation metadata operational decisions.  DOT will refer to this group for operational questions.
  • Majority rules: if over half the project is already cataloged to one standard then the remaining items will be cataloged to the same standard.
  • Catalog from the digital copy whenever possible this adds the benefit of quality control of scanning.
  • A Barton record will not be created if the only copy is a digital copy in DSpace@MIT.  Instead it is recommended that creation of a series page in Barton with a link to the DSpace@MIT collection suggesting that reports can be found in our repository.
  • The Metadata Services unit creates and maintains a wiki page for each project to document decisions made and best practices learned.

Ingest:

  • Each project is reviewed for the ingest procedure preferred and recommended.  There is flexibility on batch importing based on the origin of data.
  • All projects are mapped to Dublin Core for DSpace/Dome.
  • Projects that include fewer than 50 reports will have a temporary hire or student worker load via single item submission instead of batch loading.  The metadata script for single item submission can be found here https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/LIBMETADATA/MDBESTPRACSwrkflwDSpaceSubmission
  • Projects that contain 50 item records or more are generally recommended for batch loading performed by DOT (Carl Jones) if agreed upon by project sponsor.
  • Deposits to the repository are permanent unless General Counsel and Steering Committee recommended removal.
  • Administrators of collections in the repository should be kept to a minimum.  In Dome, Carl Jones and Beverly Turner will have access to all collections.  Andrea Schuler will be given access to all Rotch Visual Collections.  Sean Thomas and Carl Jones will be given access to all batch projects in DSpace@MIT.
  • DSpace generates a version of checksum reports.
  • For MIT Technical Reports/Working Papers we will submit only the pdf into DSpace and exclude the original tiff files used to compile the pdf. DECISION FROM IRL NEEDED
  • All files used to create items in Dome are kept in Dome.  For example:  Original tiff files used to create pdf of interviews for Perceptual Form of the City are included in the item record in Dome.  However, the tiff files are suppressed from public view. 
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