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On policies, skills & organization - LIBER curation workshop (7)
15-05-2012

The LIBER curation workshop was all about partnering and outsourcing - but that still means that there are things libraries have to do themselves, no matter what types of partnerships they enter into: they must develop policies for curation, and in order to be able to do that they must have skills and knowledge, which is also required to supervise the partnerships and assess the results. Barbara Sierman of the Dutch KB tackled the issue of policies (slides here), also building on her work on policies in the European SCAPE project (intended to develop services for large-scale preservation actions that are carried out automatically). Barbara Sierman stressed that policies are by no means just "paper work": Clear and express policies are very beneficial to an organization, Barbara Sierman went on, because they ensure consistency and sustainability in managing your digital collections. They make an organization less vulnerable when there are staff and management changes, they enable the transfer of knowledge, they enable education programmes, they harmonize activities and they bring clarity in responsibilities.
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Stepping up to the task of preserving e-mail - LIBER curation workshop (6)
15-05-2012

Another "homeless" category of digital objects (see previous post) was the subject of a "best practice" lecture at the LIBER curation workshop: e-mail. Ivan Boserup reported on an initiative by the Danish National Library to start capturing e-mail correspondences that are or will become important for researchers of Danish history, the history of learning, etc. (slides here) To me the most interesting feature of this project is that a library takes the bold decision to start capturing e-mail content without all the organizational and technical issues surrounding e-mail having been solved.
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