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State Library Digital Strategy Could Inform Procurement

The California State Library’s new Digital Preservation Strategy specifies file types for use in digitizing content, standardizing digitization, but it may also facilitate future IT projects.

The state’s central reference and research repository for government staff and legislators has codified standards on digital preservation, in a document that could have bearing on future IT procurements.

The California State Library Digital Preservation Strategy is aimed at guiding “long-term preservation and sustainable access to our digital collections,” according to its purpose statement; but it also establishes governance over “operation, management, and scope” of digital preservation and how that occurs, to ensure “reliability, authenticity, and long-term accessibility.” Among the takeaways:

  • The strategy’s principles and rules for digital preservation are designed to meet objectives including following “digital preservation standards and practices recommended by the Open Archival Information System” reference model and “those recommended by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance and Library of Congress.” A key objective is adopting “preservation strategies that allow for the incorporation of new and emerging technologies in cost-effective and responsible ways” and driving staff “expertise in digital preservation practices, procedures, and technologies.” Working on a “growing number of digital initiatives” such as California Revealed, which assists local digital preservation, made the new strategy, released in April, essential. So did discovering “different parts of the library were creating images to different ... standards,” California State Librarian Greg Lucas told Techwire; and investing “in a new digital repository” via Ex Libris. And so did the Library’s Digital Concierge Program, now about one year old, that enables state agencies to preserve aspects of their own collections.
    “It just seemed like if we’re going to be working with other people collaboratively, we should all be following the same road map,” Lucas said.
  • The Library’s preservation workflow highlights its underlying technology — its use of Ex Libris’s Rosetta digital asset management for ingestion of content; and its publishing, making content available in the Library’s online catalog via the company’s library services platform Alma, and via Primo, its public-facing “discovery service.” Ultimately, Lucas said, the new strategy could facilitate fulfilling future technology needs via RFIs and RFPs.
    “The idea of creating sort of a standard that we can follow for image ... and preservation quality, which are often the same thing but not always ... that helps us in identifying what it is we would want somebody else to do for us,” he said.
  • It’s not an active procurement, but one area of interest to Lucas is making the state’s repository of information on the COVID-19 pandemic more searchable to the public. Library staffers “did special crawling” last year over state and lawmakers’ websites to document the pandemic’s spread and the state’s response. The information now archived represents “an extraordinary resource,” the state librarian said, adding, “I don’t know how to make that ... somehow more readily searchable for the public.”
Theo Douglas is Assistant Managing Editor of Industry Insider — California.