Zach Johnson is Associate Director for Digital Special Collections at Vanderbilt University Libraries
World Digital Preservation Day (#WDPD2024) offers the digital preservation community a chance to highlight the importance of preserving our digital legacy through effective strategies collectively created by members of the Digital Preservation Coalition and other institutions around the world. This year’s theme of “Preserving Our Digital Content: Celebrating Communities” is particularly relevant to Vanderbilt University Libraries. The team at Special Collections and University Archives have made major efforts to address digital preservation needs within the libraries and have expanded the level of support we can offer to Middle Tennessee community groups. We have made this real in the fall of 2023 by hiring Sarah Calise as Metadata Coordinator and Curator of Community Histories who is explicitly tasked with working with local underrepresented communities to expand our community collections. Furthermore, we have acquired new high-quality digitization equipment, and we are continuing to spend significant staff hours documenting a digital preservation strategy, alongside developing comprehensive policies, procedures, and standards.
Sarah brought with her a huge list of existing connections with local LGBTQ+, Black, and other underrepresented groups. Many of these community groups rightfully want to maintain control over their physical and digital history, but still wish to be able to tangibly advance access for education and research while preserving their content digitally for the future. Over the past year, Vanderbilt developed a non-custodial deed of gift policy and form that allows community groups to donate digital copies of their material with specific copyright carve outs for Vanderbilt to preserve and provide access to these copies in perpetuity. If groups lack funding or resources to digitize physical content, Vanderbilt can offer to digitize the material for the organization before returning it.
A prime example of this is the Nashville Pride Collection, where people involved with the Nashville Pride organization since its founding in 1988 have donated materials for preservation at Vanderbilt or donated materials to be digitized. After receiving binders from former Pride president Mac Huffington, Phil Nagy, Digital Imaging Services Manager, digitized each page within the binders on our newly acquired Phase One Imaging System, returned the binders to Huffington along with .tiff output files, and notified the Curatorial team that these images were ready for ingest.
As part of Vanderbilt's efforts to develop digital preservation policies and procedures, an Archival and Digital Object (ADO) Identifier Standard document was created to describe the persistent identifiers assigned to all materials, including the materials from the Pride Collection. For background, Vanderbilt uses ArchivesSpace as its archival information management system, JSTOR Shared Collections as its primary access platform for 2d materials, and an S3 bucket on AWS as the storage location of preservation files (with 2 copies in 2 separate regions). The ADO identifier outlines a unique but human-readable character string that is built from the intellectual organization of the finding aid on ArchivesSpace. Importantly, this string also defines the prefix structure used to refer to an item's server address on S3. This allows us to unambiguously refer to an actual object, its metadata representation, and all forms of its digital representations.
In the case of the Pride binders, Vanderbilt’s actual “objects” are only the digital images of the binders that capture the history of Nashville Pride. The folks at that donated these can discover a permanent link to their history in their finding aid on ArchivesSpace, get digital access copy of their material that is accessible to all, and feel confident that Vanderbilt has digitally preserved their content in perpetuity with an unambiguous, extensible structure.