California Digital Library

In early 2021, the Digital Library Federation Committee on Equity and Inclusion (DLF CEI) formed a subgroup to identify resources and activities that have been useful in supporting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts across organizations that fall under the umbrella of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM), including within individual departments or functional areas. To that end, the Subgroup conducted an online survey in Spring 2022 to learn about DEI efforts that have been implemented or are underway at GLAM organizations. The Subgroup defines DEI activities as: Efforts to advance anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility across all of the organization’s activities. Through questions spanning three distinct survey components and generating both quantitative and qualitative data, respondents were asked about their work settings and their positions, DEI-related activities and topics being addressed at their GLAM organizations and larger institutions, and perceived administrative support for DEI initiatives at GLAMs and their larger institutions. 279 individuals initially responded to the survey, with 224 completing it. Analysis of the survey yielded a set of findings as well as recommendations for the community to consider.

A presentation to staff of the California Digital Library, providing an update on Cobweb development progress as of January, 2018.

Academic libraries operate in an increasingly crowded information space shared with many new public and private actors characterized by overlapping spheres of intention, capability, and responsibility.  In the areas of digital and data curation, library-hosted repository and preservation solutions are competing against alternatives with a lower barrier to entry, better user experience, and perception of functional sufficiency.  As these are also often free, libraries face increasing difficulty in retaining, let alone increasing, service adoption by their stakeholder communities.  One possible solution is suggested by questioning the often tacit assumption regarding the centrality of custodial stewardship.  What are the consequences of shifting curatorial imperatives away from *holding* a copy of a given information object to *knowing* where all the copies are?  This talk explores ideas for a post-custodial stewardship regime under which curatorial functions are applied in situ to radically-dispersed content.  In today’s do-it-yourself information environment, content will inevitably be manifest in a wide variety of venues.  While these individually may fall well short of embodying desirable levels of reliability and persistence, harnessing enough of them together within a unified post-custodial framework can nevertheless result in desirable global outcomes.  A post-custodial pattern of stewardship embraces, rather than futilely combats, the realities of today’s information ecosystem, filled with many well-funded commodity service providers.  Post-custodial curation has the potential to turn these (probably unassailable) competitors into (possibly unwitting) collaborators, and, through an appropriate division of labor, encourages libraries to direct their finite programmatic resources towards high-impact initiatives where they can uniquely add value.

The recent transition of US presidential administrations has raised awareness and concern regarding the continuity of access to federal research data.  These data are part of the vital public record of federally-funded research, and their continued availability is critically important to scientific integrity and advancement, governmental accountability, and informed public policy.  The data.gov portal was created in 2009 as a central repository of government research data, and currently hosts over 135,000 datasets.  This information is, according to the 2013 federal open data policy, “a valuable national resource and a strategic asset to the Federal Government, its partners, and the public.”  As such, it is imperative that these data are subject to effective long-term stewardship.  Best practice within the preservation community calls for redundancy, at both a technical and organizational level, as a primary strategy for higher preservation assurance.  Consequently, California Digital Library (CDL) and Code for Science & Society (CSS) collaborated with the data.gov development team on datamirror.org, a full dynamic mirror of data.gov.  datamirror.org holds descriptive metadata and links to the dataset copies of record on federal agency websites, as well as alternative links to local datamirror-managed replicas (41 TB), and soon, to other known copies that may emerge through the efforts of the national data rescue movement, in which CDL and CSS are active participants.  While instigated by recent political events, the stewardship provided by datamirror.org is merely an expression of prudent research data management that is clearly called for to ensure permanent access to the nation’s rich digital patrimony.