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The Curricular Asset Warehouse at the University of Illinois: Case study of a digital archive’s sustainability
Journal of Digital Media Management,
12
(1),
6-21
(2023)
Abstract
The production and stewardship of digital objects depends on devices and software with relatively short life cycles. As a result, when it is time to upgrade digital preservation environments and workflows, the devices that host digital objects — hard drives, monitors, computer peripherals, storage media, etc — flow out of digital repositories and contribute to the fastest growing waste stream of the 21st century: electronic waste. This paper discusses how the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently conducting a study into the sustainable management of its large volumes of digital video and image content production and preservation, within an analysis of its institutional purchasing and waste management paradigms. This analysis seeks to determine how device obsolescence at CITL can be mitigated to avoid future costs and to minimise the department’s contribution to the global e-waste problem. The first half of this paper describes how CITL employs a system called the Curricular Asset Warehouse (CAW), which is a suite of software that serves as the backbone of its media production and archival needs. CAW uses several open source software tools to be an all-in-one production, cataloguing, preservation and discovery tool. The second half of the paper discusses how CITL, which contains a high-throughput video production unit, is minimising its e-waste footprint by employing the CAW suite of tools to minimise its digital storage needs and, by extension, the amount of electronic waste produced by the department. This section also discusses the findings of an in-progress case study about the environmental impacts of CITL’s production tools and tape-based storage infrastructure.
Keywords: digital preservation; media asset management; audiovisual preservation; sustainability; electronic waste; video
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Karin Hodgin Jones is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the College of Fine & Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. In addition to teaching sustainable design and studio art, she is Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design programme. She received her MFA in studio art in 2008 and her master of urban planning degree in 2016, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In the classroom, she teaches object life-cycle assessment, critical engagement with historical and contemporary sustainability practices, and sustainable digital art practices for creative coding, video and animation production. In her planning work, she develops evaluative strategies for the effective and environmentally sound collection and management of electronic devices and electronic waste.
Robyn Bianconi is a senior instructional resources curator for the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois, and head of its Copyright and Content Management team.
Jimi Jones is an archivist for the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has a PhD and an MLIS from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois. For the past 13 years he has taught courses for the School of Information — Sciences including audiovisual preservation in libraries and archives, digital preservation and metadata in theory and practice. Jimi’s research focuses on standards for moving image digitisation — the social aspects of their design, the technical choices that drive their development and the decision-making processes of large and small cultural heritage repositories when picking an encoding/container combination for digitising legacy video materials. He is coauthor of the forthcoming book, ‘The Future of Memory: Lossless Standards in Moving Image Preservation’.
Liam Moran is an instructional resources systems specialist for the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He produces curricular digital media and manages the servers to store, process and deliver such media. He is also a contributing editor for the trade magazine Streaming Media, covering the educational video vertical.
