Facilitating preservation through collaboration: Harmonising practices across university departments

Abstract

In 2015, the Indiana University’s (IU’s) Communications Department partnered with IU Bloomington Libraries to collect and preserve born-digital institutional heritage. While this department utilises Widen as its enterprise digital asset management system, storage limitations necessitated the partnership in order for the objects to persist. Starting with 5 TB of content, IU librarians collaborated with the University Archives in order to analyse the digital objects’ metadata and determine a workflow for ingestion and long-term preservation of digital objects. This partnership expanded to include the IU Kelley School of Business as well, leading to new challenges in terms of aligning practices across various units. The partnership between IU Communications, Kelley School of Business and the IU Libraries has posed many challenges to the existing infrastructure. It has required both social and technical solutions in order to establish a collaborative workflow that will in turn provide the basis for similar future projects with other schools and departments.