Collecting the Digital You: The Birth of Digital Archives
Take a moment to think about all that is born in a digital format. Our daily interactions often happen as email. Photographs and videos are taken digitally. Books, papers and articles are mostly written on computers. Most sound recordings are made digitally. The human experience--our thinking and discovery--is now primarily recorded in digital form.
Some of the most important research collections are the personal papers, diaries, notes, and journals of famous thinkers. For example, the Cambridge University Library houses Darwin's personal papers and a collection of printed books with his annotations handwritten in the margins. Both collections are some of the most often viewed by scholars.
Years from now, in the absence of paper, how might future generations view the same work of today's famous thinkers? In a scholarly context, the question becomes even more urgent. What will become of the products of your research and teaching, which are now, more often than not, digital?
In 2003, Hewlett-Packard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers set out on a joint venture to solve some of the digital storage dilemmas facing research institutions. Known as DSpace, the software platform "captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes an organization's research data."1 DSpace quickly became a place where the "MIT faculty (could) deposit their digital assets."2 At the same time, teams of researchers at the University of Virginia and Cornell were developing the Fedora project with similar aims.3 Library information systems provider Ex Libris was also working on their product, DigiTool.4
More importantly, at the time the first software platforms were being developed, the concept that institutions needed to permanently and securely store their intellectual capital in one central, easily accessible digital "location" began to take hold. Today, these digital storehouses are known as institutional repositories (IRs). Their missions are basic--preserve the intellectual output created by faculty and students so that it can be freely and readily accessed by current and future scholars. According to the Registry of Open Access Repositories, of the 221 registered repositories in the US, 126 are digital repositories based at institutions. This includes MIT's DSpace@MIT (which now contains dozens of research materials of MIT faculty, researchers, departments, labs, and centers and over 14,000 theses), Cornell's eCommons@Cornell, Georgia Tech's SMARTech; and the University of Kansas' KU ScholarWorks, among dozens of others nationwide.5
The contents of these IRs are vast and varied--often they include pre-prints or post-prints of published papers, research data, conference presentations, public performances and exhibitions, theses and dissertations, and other multi-media work. Their potential impact on scholarly communications and how research is being done is just now beginning
to emerge.