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Syracuse University Libraries’ Digital Library program expanded this summer with the creation of the new Department of Digital Stewardship.

The department focuses on the technical aspects of digital scholarship and ventures to use digital tools to make knowledge and learning more accessible on campus. 

The digital stewardship program hopes to provide an organizational home for the technical support necessary to hone in on its paired area of digital scholarship, said Déirdre Joyce, department head of the program.

The departments of digital stewardship and digital scholarship function as twin pillars, Joyce said, and both fall under the Digital Library program, with digital stewardship managing the tools that undergird digital scholarship’s content curation.

So far, the department hired Suzanne Preate, a digital initiatives librarian who manages digital production and collection development, and Sarah Pohley, a library technician for digitization who works with the technology used to create digital materials. The department is still looking to fill the positions of digital content coordinator, digital preservation librarian and metadata strategies librarian, according to an SU News release from August. 

“We really focus on sort of the outreach side of things and understanding how people are using digital tools to create different ways of knowing and learning, and not just understanding that but facilitating that.” Joyce said.

Technicians create “digital objects”: the products of the visuals, audio and descriptions used to bring a physical object to the screen. The team then compiles these digital objects to create digital collections. The department is dedicated to the management, accessibility and production of these objects.

The department uses a digital imaging lab in the basement of Bird Library, as well as an audio lab in the Belfer Audio Archive next door, in producing digitized content. Once metadata or descriptions are added, content will be ready to be shared online. Part of this curation means viewing digital objects as physical ones, Joyce said.

“We also preserve those digital materials so that there’s persistent access to them over time. Because the digital objects that are being created, if we don’t think of their physicality, if we don’t think of them as having actually a presence, we can take them for granted,” Joyce said.

In creating digital content, the department is not only dedicated to creating a new system of information generally available to the campus but also to ensuring its physical and educational accessibility for all students and faculty, including those with visual, hearing and cognitive impairments.

“With our (Audio Visual) materials, and optical character recognition on objects, we are making sure that to the extent that we can that the documents that we are creating are fully accessible for those that need screen readers and (Optical Character Recognition),” Joyce said.

Digitized materials will be hosted online by a platform called Quartex, said Scott Warren, the associate dean for research excellence.

“(The platform) is not public yet, but the infrastructure to hold digital assets is a huge, huge decision. It’s not something you choose very often — it might be a once in a decade decision,” Warren said. “After about a year-long investigation into this, we’re restarting migration and have a lot of content.”

As research and scholarship become increasingly based in the digital world, researchers and curators of collections have worked to meet a new standard for accessibility. During the pandemic, the demand for availability and comprehensibility of online resources became unavoidable, said Petrina Jackson, director of the Special Collections Research Center.

“It’s not like we’re entering into a digital age, we’re smack in it. (With) COVID, we’re smack in that too. (Digitization) is not something niche. It is essential to people’s education, and our collection materials in the humanities are our data,” Jackson said. “Gone are the days where it’s optional. It is a legitimate and growing part of the enterprise, and we need to treat it as such.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, the platform Quartex was misspelled. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

 

Published on October 10, 2021 at 11:28 pm

Contact Jana: jlseal@syr.edu | @JanaLoSeal