0.12 The evia digital archive project: challenges and solutions  (Page 7/10)

Online users must digitally "sign" an End User License Agreement that describes their responsibilities and the restrictions on uses of the material. Furthermore, depositors control which portions of their video recordings may be publicly accessed. We have made the EULA prominent at login because we want to stress the responsibility inherent in using the materials.

Scholarly publishing

As the project developed and matured, scholarly publishing became a more integral part of what we were doing. As a result, we needed to support some of the functions typically maintained by academic societies and presses. Thus far, the editorial functions of the project—initial vetting, developing stylistic conventions, peer review management, and copyediting—have all been conducted from within the project. We have followed the editorial model of many journals and, aside from the nature of the content, the process is very similar. However, this aspect has been the most difficult to establish within our infrastructure. For the future, we are imagining that we would play a coordinating role but that the editorial functions would move to the places they have typically resided in the scholarly world—the academic societies. We have initiated discussions with an academic society regarding the management of the peer review process and perhaps ultimately the editorial control over published annotations for collections from a certain discipline. Collections that come out of other disciplines can conceivably be managed in the same way. The obstacles are financial and cultural. Either the society funds an editor to pay for a graduate student to handle the management editor’s duties, or the society finds a volunteer willing to do the work because it will help his or her career. At present, the former scenario is too expensive for the society to take on and, in the case of the latter, the academic culture does not seem to give enough credit for the amount of work involved in online publications. However, these are paths we continue to explore.

Collection development

We found the summer institute process we utilized during project development to be an incredibly productive and satisfying model. It is also very expensive. While we hope to do more summer institutes in the future, we know we cannot be entirely dependent on them for collection development. At present, we are providing preservation and access services as part of our collaboration on several grant projects. In some cases this is allowing us to expand our core holdings. We are also working to accommodate born-digital recordings and their promise to enlarge content with minimal investment in preservation services. Born-digital recordings offer significant cost savings because they eliminate the expensive analog-to-digital preservation transfer step. While ingesting born-digital recordings still has workflow and preservation requirements that are not as simple as one might think, the rapid change in the consumer video recording marketplace to tape-less formats is going to enable the acquisition of new collections at less cost.