MAIREAD MARTIN: April 2009 Archives
What is it and what's it good for?
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.
We are using the word "stewardship" in the program's title rather than "management" because our focus is on supporting content across its whole lifecycle. Implicit in the word "stewardship" is an expectation on the part of the user that we can be trusted to care for their content; durability and sustainability are thus fundamental to our approach.
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.
Neal Vines, Director of IT in the College of Agricultural Sciences, and I are co-chairing a new working group to explore common requirements and common solutions for data storage across Penn State. The group is composed of members from the College IT Directors and Campus IT Directors groups as well as the chair of the ITS ITANA storage working group (ITANA is the ITS architectural collaborative). We are developing three use cases to begin with: archival storage, storage of sensitive data, and e-science/research data storage, and extracting requirements from these. We will then work with ITANA storage to consider how we might address some of our common issues and look at possible central storage service offerings.
