Operating Principles for CUL's Digital Assets
The following operating principles are aim to support life cycle management of our digital collections and to ensure the creation of digital content that is of high-quality and everlasting.
1) Plan for Life Cycle Management
a. Recognize that every initiative we undertake has multiple and ongoing phases - they are not one-time efforts.
b. Plan for different project phases in advance so that we can make the right technical decisions to support different stages of the initiative.
c. Lifecycle management implies institutional commitment and reinforces the connection between development and preservation.
d. Financial management of initiatives should take into consideration long-term expenses, not one time creation costs.
e. Place equal emphasis on planning, development, management, and maintenance stages.
2) Practice Stewardship:
a. Assign curatorial roles and technical leads for each initiative for accountability and ongoing stewardship to facilitate continuing management and priority setting.
b. Periodically audit the existing collections and assess their value from various perspectives including usability, technical stability, standards support, etc.
3) Push Content Where Users Are
a. Know your audience - understand their needs and work environment.
b. Conduct regular user studies to understand how our collections are being used and set outcome measures to assess use.
c. Take into consideration interoperability and federated access and retrieval principles.
d. Use standards and systems that will enable pushing content to users' preferred research environments, such as common search engines or portals.
e. Add features to enable deeper crawling of content by Google and use OAI systematically.
4) Use the Digital Collections Registry
a. Record information about the existing and new collections and services systematically. Key information elements include collection-level definition and characterization, rights management, delivery platforms, curatorial and technical support roles, statistics, web services support.
http://rdc.library.cornell.edu/
5) CUL Digital Preservation Policy:
a. Follow the principles outlined in the Policy, which formalizes Cornell University Library's continuing commitment to the long-term preservation of its diverse and extensive range of digital assets.
http://commondepository.library.cornell.edu/cul-dp-framework.pdf
oyr1/june07