Digital curation enables long-term preservation and access to rich Fondren collections of digitized print materials and born-digital content. The processes for digital curation require space for careful thought and the resources to find solutions for preserving the historical record and scholarly output of Rice University. (From “News from Fondren,” Spring 2015)
Fondren’s Digital Curation Lab (DCL) offers digital preservation services and digitization of analog or at-risk materials as well as a meeting space for small teams to discuss digital scholarship projects. Fondren Library staff can consult on best practices for imaging, archival storage, digital forensics (tasks such as identifying file formats and creating file inventories), metadata development and other digital curation activities as needed.
Lab equipment includes:
- Indus Large Format Scanner, which can handle items 50 inches x 36 inches or books up to 9.24 inches thick and a maximum weight of 55 lbs.
- Media workstation (Mac) configured to handle resource-intensive formats such as video and audio, with large storage capacity and specialized software.
- BitCurator workstation that performs digital forensics analysis of analog formats (such as 3.5″ floppy, jaz, zip, superdisk) and supports the preservation of electronic records.
Fondren staff from several departments use this equipment and meeting space to collaborate on numerous projects and provide services to the Rice community, including:
- Handling rare and fragile items
- Project management, including large-scale digitization projects
- Digitization consultation, training and ongoing support
- Liaising with digital scholarship publication systems, including Rice University’s digital scholarship archive (RDSA), Rice JSTOR Forum and Omeka.
Learn more about the DCL–including how to submit a work request–at https://library.rice.edu/services/digital-curation-lab.