Planning and Building a Digital Collections Program, May 10, 2012

I recently had the pleasure of working with a colleague from Amherst College to organize a regional forum on "Planning and Building a Digital Collections Program". Kelcy Shepherd and I organized this event through the NorthEast Regional Computing Program, better known as NERCOMP. Our goal was to bring together speakers on a variety of topics related to creating digital collections in a library or archive setting. The forum included four presenters:

• Dartmouth College Library's own David Seaman, Associate Librarian for Information Management, who spoke about our Digital Library Program Plan and the process we’ve gone through to develop our digital collections infrastructure over the past several years.
• David Mathews, Partner at The Image Collective, who gave a detailed presentation on the important technical considerations for digital imaging.
• Nancy McGovern, Head of Curation and Preservation Services at MIT Libraries, who covered the basic components of digital preservation planning. This talk was a very abbreviated version of the ICPSR's five-day Digital Preservation Management Workshop, which builds on the Digital Preservation Management Tutorial found here.
• Anne Sauer, Director and University Archivist at Tufts University, who talked about the challenges and strategies involved in advocating for digital collections funding within a larger campus environment.

All of the presentations were excellent, and Kelcy and I had a great time organizing the event. The presenters' slides can be found here (some slides are not yet available, but will be soon). Many thanks to all the presenters and participants, and to NERCOMP for hosting the forum!

Written by Helen Bailey.