Duke Libraries is expanding its collection of digital images, books, articles, videos and recordings.
Coordinating this Digital Asset Initiatives effort is Paul Conway, who recently assumed the newly created position of director of library digital asset initiatives. He previously was the director of information technology services at Perkins Library.
"We're living in a digital world," Conway said. "And as we move increasingly toward creating and using and recreating information in digital form, the volume and complexity of that digital data is growing."
Without active management of that data, valuable information can be lost when file formats change, hard drives are erased or database owners leave without documenting their methods.
The library currently makes available through its website 65,000 images, 15,000 journals and tens of thousands of electronic books, in addition to the six million records in its online catalog.
To expand those digital collections, Conway said the program could target databases, papers, websites, videos, recordings, images, correspondence, dissertations and syllabi created at Duke that are already in electronic form.
"In looking at digital assets, we're trying to look beyond the library," he said. "There's the assumption, of course, that the library's holdings will be a part of what we're looking at, but the idea is to put the library's holdings in context with the rest of the campus -- and there's a lot out there."
As an example of the kind of materials that might be available through the library website, Conway points to the Law School's Faculty Scholarship Repository, a database of journal articles by Duke Law School faculty.
Other examples of digital content that could be archived and indexed by the library are online student portfolios, course materials stored in the Blackboard course management system and electronic versions of dissertations, Conway said. The University Records Management program is working with the Center Instructional Technology (CIT) to develop retention schedules and other guidelines.
And then there's all the email, reports and records generated in the course of running the university and medical center.
"The entire record of this university as an organization and as a community is pretty much created digitally and exists digitally," Conway said. "The University Archives and Records Management program is already investigating specifically how we identify, capture and manage the most essential electronic records that are coming from the university. Partnerships with University Archives, Records Management, CIT, Office of Information Technology, Medical Center Archives and other interested parties will be vital to developing campus-wide solutions."
Conway explained how digital collections can benefit faculty and students.
"Undergraduates have grown up in the Internet environment and they have come to expect -- rightly or wrongly -- that they're going to learn with the assistance of digital content," he said. "The advantage of the library or the university is that we can help ensure quality; we can help ensure timely access; we can help ensure that the content that's available is the content that faculty want their students to be discovering."
Managing that content, he said, could well be "the essential complement" to the Duke Digital Initiative, which seeks to make digital materials available for academic instruction.
Faculty who submit digital versions of their research findings for archiving can expect those findings to be easily shared and stored in durable formats.
"Many faculty still think that the product of their work is the printed journal -- whether it's Nature or Behavioral and Brain Science or The American Historical Review," he said. "But the real product of their work is the digital document they submit to the journal, I think."
"Almost everybody has a stake," he said. "The point of the Digital Asset Initiatives is that there probably isn't a person on this campus who isn't actually living, working and playing in a digital environment. The next step will be to bring together a meeting of all campus stakeholders to plan the future of this important collaborative initiative."