The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation

by Trevor Owens

Where in the past, I imagine, a cataloger would have needed to create a record for my dissertation, the system is now set up in such a way that the work of doing that is handed off to the dissertation’s author. Institutional repositories are used for much more than dissertations; many contain items like meeting minutes, podcasts, PowerPoint presentations, research data sets, video recordings, and more. The strength of this system (largely, that the keys have been handed over to the users) is simultaneously its biggest weakness. It is easy for these systems to become a “roach motel” where people inconsistently upload and inadequately describe digital objects.15 They tend to work well for something like dissertations, where it is possible to insist that someone cannot graduate without depositing their dissertation. But beyond that, these systems tend to unevenly represent an institution’s records. That is, the comprehensiveness of this kind of collection is going to live or die based on how well it incentivizes the participation of its users. When a library hires someone to systematically describe and catalog a collection, it ends up with highly consistent metadata and levels of description. Handing that function over to the individual end user can easily result in spotty and inconsistent data.