adopted: December 5th, 2019
Amherst College Library Digital Collections Content Strategy
This is a summary of the library’s existing and aspirational strategies around stewarding digital collections content that the library either provides access to or manages in digital form. The following categories illustrate the two main areas of work, specifically focusing on access to digital collections and repositories, and digital preservation of materials.
Access to digitized materials
Publicly available digital repositories and collections hosted through the library (ACDC)
The library provides access to digital primary source and/or instructional materials in a variety of formats that support the teaching and research activity of the college, and also reflect the mission and values of the library and college. To that end, the library maintains digital repositories that provide access, organization, and preservation of these materials. The following four categories represent that major areas of collecting in the library’s digital repositories. Whenever possible these materials are made available freely to the public, but some may require Amherst College affiliation to access.
- Digital archive of college scholarly materials (Octagon, student theses, research data)
- Digitized Archives & Special Collections (DASC) (see specific collection development policy)
- College hosted digital humanities projects (DSSF, LGBT Timeline)
- Licensed images for on-campus use (Art & Architecture collection)
Publicly available digital content created by the library but hosted or harvested elsewhere
- Amherst College Library collection in Internet Archive - college catalogs, government publications
- Books on Amherst College History - Internet Archive
- Fulcrum - books produced by AC Press
- Digital Commonwealth, DPLA
- ACDC records harvested and displayed in EDS
Digital Preservation of college materials
Digital holdings managed by the library - born digital, reformatted materials
Archival collections
- Born digital materials (hard drives, digital files)
- Reformatted media (AV, old disk drives)
- Embargoed materials that have been digitized (ex: Alumni news, Amherst magazine)
Web archives of selected college websites (currently hosted by ArchiveIT)
- some student publication websites, student theses with website component, main college website, Amherst uprising-related websites, special collections websites where appropriate
College records - hosted in external campus offices (we may or may not have control over this section)
- College email
- College digital files, AV materials, department records
- College databases with content that will go into archives (ex: college photographer records, student theses..,)
Amherst College Digital Collections materials
- Access copies of digitized files
- Master copies of digitized files
- Metadata records
- Software architecture documentation to be able to rebuild our repositories