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Library Staff News

April 24, 2003 Author: CDLCategories:

New Director of Digital Preservation Program

Patricia Cruse, CDL, has been appointed as the new director of the Digital Preservation Program.

The program, located at CDL, has been established to assist the UC libraries in persistently managing digital information, achieving the same level of stewardship for that information that they demonstrate with print – a level of stewardship essential to the libraries’ support of UC’s world-class research and teaching.

The Digital Preservation Program is housed by the CDL and supported not only by the CDL but through:

  • co-investment of the UC libraries;
  • leveraging technology, staff, and technical development efforts at partner institutions (including UC Berkeley library, Stanford University Computing Science Department, Stanford University Library, San Diego Super Computer Center); and
  • external funding (the program is currently in receipt of two grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).

The program already consists of three strands of activity that give the UC libraries practical experience of different preservation strategies as appropriate to the persistent management of different kinds of digital information. Strands include:

  1. Establishment of a UC libraries digital preservation repository for persistent management of digital assets created by the UC libraries (catalog records, finding aids, digital surrogates for holdings in library, archive, and special collections).  Work on the program (recommended initially in a report of SOPAG’s Digital Preservation Advisory Committee) is conducted in collaboration between CDL and UC Berkeley library.
  2. Participation in the LOCKSS beta test to explore this experimental caching software as a possible means for capturing and locally managing licensed electronic journal and other content that contributes to the shared digital collection. Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS), is an initiative based at Stanford University Library.
  3. Evaluating methods for the capture, curation, and persistent management of web-based materials.  With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the digital preservation program is evaluating methods for gathering and persistently managing web-based materials produced or disseminated by US state and federal governments.  Although dealing exclusively with government information, the project will provide the university libraries with some minimal understanding of preservation strategies appropriate to web-based materials generally.

As the program’s director, Trisha’s main tasks will include:

  • integrating and developing these strands of activity into a coherent and effectively managed program;
  • hiring technical and other program staff for which funding has been made available; and
  • communicating about the program with the UC libraries and other stakeholders.

Trisha is no stranger to the CDL or the UC system.  She has served on systemwide committees and task forces and spent five years in the Social Sciences and Humanities Library at UCSD. Drawing upon that and other academic library experience, she first came to the CDL to manage its Government Information and Social Science Data program, successfully leading development of the Counting California service.  She also helped initiate and guide the Mellon-funded effort described in #3 above.  Consulting with Trisha and others, over the next several weeks the CDL will redistribute ongoing responsibilities for Counting California and the Government Information and Social Science data program.  The results of that transition will be shared widely.