Digital Preservation and Digital Collections

Ithaka's 2006 survey of faculty members sought to determine their attitudes related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning and related subjects.  This study affords the opportunity to develop trend analysis of many measurements collected in the 2003 and 2000 faculty surveys. As in the past, Ithaka developed a robust set of disciplinary and other demographic analyses that have allowed them to learn more about how best to serve the needs of different types of faculty members. Findings include;

Led by Lake Forest College, Chicago-area academic, cultural, and civic institutions are developing VBI, the Virtual Burnham Initiative, with 3D models re-creating the 1909 Plan of Chicago housed on a project website. VBI is a project about the Chicagoland community that builds community between academic institutions, area organizations, and the greater public through technology.

In creating a digital library collection on World War II, Texas A&M University-Commerce discovered an opportunity to work in partnership with local museums, public libraries, and historical societies. This diverse community greatly expands our ability to preserve historical resources and make them available to scholars worldwide.

The paper describes four large-scale projects—Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books, Open Content Alliance, and the Million Book Project—and their digitization strategies. It then discusses a range of issues affecting the stewardship of the digital collections they create: selection, quality in content creation, technical infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure. The paper also attempts to foresee the likely impacts of large-scale digitization on book collections.

Only by transforming knowledge contained in print to new and easily accessible digital formats can we guarantee its survival.

The author discusses the various cultural treasures which make up part of the scholarly evidence and cultural history that is to be digitized over the coming decades.

A challenge arises in making digital information and communication technologies accessible to indigenous communities. From digital preservation of cultural and historic artifacts to embedding culturally sensitive materials in academic courses, technology can become a double-edged sword: it can be deployed to obfuscate a critical analysis of how "communication" is understood as meaningful by First Nations themselves.

EDUCAUSE joined a broad coalition in filing an amicus, or friend of the court, brief on behalf of the National Geographic Society which seeks permission to reproduce a print collective work in electronic format. At issue is ensuring the availability, preservation and dissemination of prior research which is essential for scholarly advancement. Oral arguments are expected to take place in the Eleventh Circuit Court during the week of February 25th, 2008, with a decision rendered at some point thereafter.