Ingest scheduling for DAMS at LSE: blending technical and curatorial input

Fabiana Barticioti is Digital Assets Manager at  LSE Library

LSE Library has just completed an assessment of the significance of our major legacy digitised collections to help inform our Preservation Programme. The outcome is a focused and short list of collections deemed to be suitable for long-term preservation. The decision process had some technical aspects, but the exercise was mostly curatorial.

LSE Library started its digital preservation journey back in 2009. Initial development gravitated towards the application of open-source software with a priority on providing open access to collections to the wider community. The initial ambition covered digitised collections, born-digital material and research outputs from the LSE community.

Since then, our capabilities for managing digital content expanded and so did our understanding of what it entails in practical terms. While the Library has been able to continue providing access to various forms of digital content, the software available did not supported required digital preservation actions. In 2018, the Library carried out a procurement exercise and implemented a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) to help with preservation as well as collection dissemination.

This provided the Library with a dedicated team to plan and implement digital preservation actions including an ingest schedule focusing on wider access. We started at looking our digitised collections, with some of them created in the early 2000’s. However, when I started consulting with colleagues about prioritising those collections, I got a response that not all of our 80 legacy digitised collections were worth the effort of preserving.

After some discussions we decided to carry out a significance assessment for our digitised legacy collections. It was a cross-departmental exercise with input from the Archives and Special Collections, Institutional Archives Archivist and Learning & Outreach teams collaborating with my team, the Digital Library.

We did not have to start from scratch as the Library conducted two relevant exercises back in 2018. We created a Digitised Collections Audit, based on DPC template, which contained sufficient “technical” details but provided little curatorial information. In additional to that the Library conducted a formal significance assessment for the Library’s analogue collections and created a report on our Unique and Distinctive Collections. Both exercises provided a solid starting point for us to map our portfolio of digitised collections against a set of significance criterion.

We ended up creating a series of categories on the value of legacy collections and used them to indicate which ones:

• Should be ingested through our DAMS as they are.

• Should be revisited due to poor quality of legacy formats or has potential to be developed further as part of the Library’s digitisation programme.

• Are more suitable to disseminate on alternative online platforms and may not qualify for our DAMS.

After deciding on what should go through the DAMS I then created an indicative ingest schedule. Other factors considered at this point included availability of preferred file formats for dissemination and the workflows necessary to shape datasets and metadata to our accepted “bag” formatting for our DAMS. 

As a result, we defined a focused and short ingest schedule; a list we hope to deliver within two years. The delivery of this project has been affected by current Covid restrictions and home working circumstances. Despite some setbacks, we have kicked started with ingesting collections digitised for some time that were not available to the public in any other online platforms. Check out our new LSE Digital Library and first collections to have made it to our new DAMS.