Lisa Schmidt, the electronic records archivist at Michigan State University on “Digital Curation Planning at Michigan State University.” MSU has 33,000 cubic feet of MSU records in their archives and actively works with various campus departments to gain their content. The archives at MSU are a unit separate from the libraries. Funded by a grant, the archives sought to create a plan for digital curation of content.
In seeking to learn more about the various campus units and their content, MSU began a campus survey and environmental scan to learn what was currently being done. This proved too ambitious and the focus changed to conducting several in-depth interviews with select campus units/departments. Interviews asked units/departments about the types of data they collected and its formats, whether or not they stored confidential data and if they were using any digital content system currently. MSU wanted to provide guidelines to various campus units, not own or control the unit's data. They also wanted to provide guidelines for electronic records appraisal, file formats and the like.
Following the interviews, a few targeted projects were selected. Those included:
- Extension services
- University relations.
MSU archives digital curation blog
If you have not seen this article by Richard J. Cox in Educause Review from 2008 on the future of academic archives and their mission in the digital age, it is worth a read.
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