Critical Cataloguing for Digital Preservation: a research commercialisation follow-on project

Announcements

Preserving our Digital Pasts: Stories, Methods, Futures (13 June 2024, University of Southampton)

REGISTER HERE

This one-day gathering will unite professionals from digital preservation, cultural heritage, and related fields to share experiences, explore preservation methodologies, and envision future collaborations. The event, hosted by Digital Preservation Southampton, will feature a mix of talks, panel discussions, and rapid training sessions designed to educate, enlighten, and facilitate networking.

See the event page for further details on how to book your place.

Project Details

This project addresses the stewarding of digital assets within cultural and heritage organisations. Although the technical problems associated with this complex issue have been largely solved, two further difficulties prevent them from being adequately implemented. The first is the limited capacity of a much-pressed sector and the second is the need for increased attentiveness to the social and cultural conditions that arise from the preservation of digital artifacts. This project, drawing on original research and a scoping study of the needs of the market, will provide commercial solutions to both.

Specifically, the project will maximise the impact of recently completed AHRC-funded research into justice-oriented cataloguing practices (‘Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship’), by embedding research outcomes into the development of a novel commercial activity, the Southampton Digital Preservation Advisory Unit. Once market ready it will offer commercial products - such as expert classes, in-house training, and retained consultancy on digital preservation - that are rooted in critical cataloguing practices to a target market of small- to medium- sized GLAM institutions, community heritage groups, and civic and commericial organisations.

In previous research we have established that Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) professionals were keen to renew, revise, and refresh their approach to metadata production and use. Initial market research has also established that there is a commercial opportunity to offer expert, hands-on, and targeted training, guidance, and support to GLAM institutions and community heritage groups in developing new forms of digital preservation best practice. By combining these two insights this rapid 11-month programme of research commercialisation activity will:

• Develop a commercial model for digital preservation training, support, and advice that foregrounds the importance of critical cataloguing practices within the digital preservation lifecycle.
• Establish the DigiPres Cohort: a group of individuals from GLAM institutions and community heritage groups seeking digital preservation training, support, and advice, the composition of which is balanced across anticipated markets, collection types, and ED&I considerations.
• Stress-test methods for market delivery, pilot commercial channels, and price point tolerances in our target market.
• Analyse data on market positioning and on commercial pilots through ongoing market intelligence gathering activities.
• Commission a project evaluation report that measures success against objectives, reflects on lessons learned, and supports commercial decision making in the medium to long term.
• Report on market need for digital preservation services that foreground critical cataloguing practices and justice-oriented preservation metadata within the digital preservation lifecycle.

Critical Cataloguing for Digital Preservation: a research commercialisation follow-on project is a Southampton Digital Humanities project. The project run between September 2023 and July 2024. The project builds on research outcomes of Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship, a project funded under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) “UK-US Collaboration for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions: Partnership Development Grants” scheme.

People

The project is led by James Baker, Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Humanities, University of Southampton.

Our Commercialisation Project Officer is Joash Johnson.

Our participants include digital preservation professionals, archivists, librarians, and museum curators with digital preservation needs. They were selected following a call for participation

Funding

Critical Cataloguing for Digital Preservation: a research commercialisation follow-on project is funded under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) “Arts and Humanities-led Research Commercialisation” scheme. Project Reference AH/Y005546/1. Funding value £40,954. The project is live between 1 September 2023 and 31 July 2024.

Open

This project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (exceptions: logos and marked images). Unless otherwise stated, project code is licensed under a GNU General Public License v3.0.