e-Content Stewardship Program: Part I: Setting the Scene

I've been meaning to do an update on the e-Content Stewardship Program for awhile now. In our joint strategic plan for 2008/9 - 2013, ITS and the University Libraries agreed to work together to create a new program to support existing and emerging content management needs. In our respective strategic plans, we referred to this by the rather unwieldy title of the "Cyberinfrastructure, e-Content and Data Stewardship Program," which we've now abbreviated to the "e-Content Stewardship Program." In the last few months, we've been working on getting this program up on its feet.

We are using the word "program" rather than "initiative" or "project" since our intent is to pursue a formal, collaborative, and systematic approach that will enable us to develop services and infrastructure that can be extended to and reused in a variety of contexts. These contexts include scholarly communications, electronic records, electronic theses and dissertations, publishing services, and research data management.

If this seems like an ambitious undertaking, then you've got the picture. However, if you're aware of the resources, time, and energy it takes to bring up a single application, then you'll likely appreciate the rationale behind investing in reusable service and application components. If you've experienced the frustration of searching across siloed content management systems, enough said. If you're responsible for archiving data for an established duration of time for compliance reasons, then an approach that is founded on sustainability should be attractive. If you've listed to our constituents talk about their content, you've likely recognized a common expectation that the content that we've enabled them to create and publish will be persistent, and that we'll take care of that. (Indeed, our stewardship role may end up being what distinguishes us from the Googles and Amazons of the world. This is a traditional role for libraries, needless to say.)

In the blog postings to follow, I'll write about where things stand with planning. I'll also describe a couple of early "anchor" projects and our approach to them to hopefully illustrate the approach we're taking.