The Stanford Digital Repository, from the
early days of its conception, has expected it will offer a range of services–
from bit preservation to format migrations, metadata encoding, and anything
between and beyond given available resources, technology, and know-how.
Levels of Service will be necessary because we anticipate a varied range of
clients with varied needs.
This slide – which I liberally borrowed from Keith Johnson – concisely conveys
our need for more than one (and no doubt more than these two) preservation
workflows.
A Prescriptive workflow for digital content created by the libraries in our
digitization labs, which assumes that we have total control over the quality
and integrity of our own output, and that it is more homogenous is nature and
thus easier to manage, more predictable over time.
We also have need for a reactive workflow, for “real world”, “off the street”
content that we must assume is untamed and heterogeneous in nature.
A reactive workflow translates into repository services for
Stanford Curators who are acquiring:
websites (both snapshots grabbed
from web and entire archives from commercial enterprises)
electronic records in the personal papers of prolific poets (email,
business records).
Then there’s the content produced by Stanford’s academic
departments:
just kicking off a Faculty Advisory Board for the SDR to help to develop,
review, and advise on University policy on the preservation of Stanford's
digital assets
And then there is the talk of the possibility of non-Stanford entities
availing themselves of SDR services.