9.2 A Comprehensive Approach Towards the Curation of Born Digital Material by Leiden University Libraries
Creators: name: Van Duijn, Mart
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2017
Subjects: digital, Leiden University, libraries, Netherlans

description: One of the central tasks of Leiden University Libraries is to preserve academic heritage: the objects and the results of scholarship created through the centuries and everything related to the history, culture and traditions of the university. The library has more than four hundred years of experience in managing publications and archives of Leiden scholars, mostly written or printed on paper. The digital turn, however, has forced us to rethink our strategies and to update our skills. We are confronted with a multitude of heterogeneous born digital materials, coming from different scholarly processes such as research, publication and communication. These developments pose serious challenges to our existing library infrastructure. Furthermore, Open Science will change the way researchers work and will affect the role of the academic library considerably. Therefore, we need to act. Leiden University Libraries is currently in the process of formulating a policy on born digital materials, to create a workflow that will enable us to manage this material effectively and to select or to develop services for the long term storage and accessibility of these objects. A challenge is to maintain the integrity and authenticity of the materials in such a way that the digital objects can be presented in context through our online library catalogue, facilitating the access to these objects as well as possible. Our aim is to ensure that born digital academic heritage can be visible, usable and sustainable, in compliance with the guidelines of the Dutch national strategy for digital heritage. These guidelines demand a research infrastructure which is open and participatory, and which scales to the needs of users in the research, archive, libraries and heritage domains, in step with international standards for trusted digital repositories. To be able to manage the disparate forms of digital academic heritage (publications, research data and software, websites, email, etc.) it was necessary, firstly, to develop a typology of born digital materials. We have devised a model which describes the different types of objects, together with the different domains in which they function (research, general library collections, heritage collections). Subsequently, we linked the different object types to relevant applications and to service providers to curate these objects. This model interestingly revealed that, at present, specific types of applications or services are not fully equipped yet to serve our purposes. Using this model as a basis, we are able to evaluate our approach and assess the selected preferred service providers through a series of pilot projects. At the moment, for example, we are collaborating with a Leiden professor who seeks to secure his paper and digital archive after his retirement, and who turned to Leiden University Libraries for preservation. In this paper, we will discuss the comprehensive approach followed by Leiden University Libraries, the object type/domain model, domain architecture and the various challenges that emerge from the aim to manage born digital material more generally.