My biggest priority as Brown’s first Digital Preservation Librarian is the implementation of a Digital Curation Policy Framework. The workflows and tools I wrote about last week are certainly very important, but without a policy framework, we as a Library will continue to ask the same questions over and over. Without a framework, projects seem ad hoc and feel like you’re repeatedly re-inventing the wheel. During the past year and a half, I’ve asked (and been asked) the same questions over and over again: “what are our access priorities?”, “what level of preservation are we committed to?”, “what are the standards we strive to maintain?”, etc.. A policy framework asks those questions ahead of time and supplies a ruler for assessing the viability or progress of a project.
I assumed framework implementation would need a seven person committee from the very beginning; we would workshop an initial draft as a group and pass it around the Library for feedback. Thankfully, some colleagues of mine also recognized the need for policy and suggested a different path. Rather than assemble a large committee as step 1, three of us put together the initial draft using the DPM Workshop’s Model Document as a guide. This way we could get something in black and white that people could comment on and revise. We could avoid having too many cooks in the kitchen as we put something together from scratch.
I’m glad we built the initial draft this way. Once we had something on paper, the three of us went through the document section by section and got a clearer view of its breadth. We noted specific decisions outside the purview of our individual jobs, and we listed a series of specific questions that will be useful conversation starters as we pass the draft around. We’re now in the very early stages of soliciting external feedback and plotting a path forward for further revisions, but I’m hopeful that, once implemented, the policy will live as an elastic document that bolsters and informs decision-making across the Library and University.