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Re: "Archiving" University Course Catalogs



Eric­
Frank is on vacation for a couple of weeks so I'll answer for him. He did receive a handful of replies off list but most offered suggestions about storage or preservation which, while useful, didn't speak directly to his question, which was more administrative than procedural.

We think that long-term archival storage, retrieval, data migration, etc may need to be the responsibility of the originating offices rather than the Archives, at least for some electronic records series, the course catalog for our example.

That won't let the Archives off the hook of our ultimate responsibility, but it does let us concentrate on making retention policy, creating union cataloging, providing reference services, etc, while distributing preservation costs across our institution and having the records administered by those who know them best. Essentially, the Archives would be delegating some of its responsibility to another entity.

Frank's question spoke to our need to make policies and rules that would be the basis for such a delegated agreement. Has anybody else tried to do this? Surely, cooperating offices will have to obligate themselves to ensure secure storage, to perform data migration, to provide adequate public access to multiple longitudinal sets of annual data. Surely there would have to be fall-back arrangements should the office become unwilling or incapable of preserving the records. Doubtless there are other things we haven't thought of.

Are we the only archives that thinks it might be easier to distribute some of the responsibility than to get a whole bunch of new money and staff to do it all ourselves? If not, has anybody got a start on writing up policies to make sure this kind of delegation works? That?s what we'd like to hear more about.

-­Steve Masar
University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives

At 02:36 PM 2/23/2000 -0500, you wrote:
Frank:
Did you get any responses to your query about colleciting electronic
versions of catalogs?
Erik Nordberg
Michigan Tech

At 09:55 AM 2/10/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Colleagues,
>
>The University Archives of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is
>involved  in designing a process to preserve digital version(s) of our
>academic catalogs.   We have acknowledged through a set of electronic
>records  policy principles that  the preservation of electronic records may
>be a distributed responsibility for our institution, and that we would not
>attempt to acquire electronic records in all cases or have the capability
>within the Archives to maintain them .  Rather, we want to assure that the
>records creators maintain an archival copy -- as archivists, not
>techno-geeks, use the term.  The Archives would  maintain bibliographic
>information about the catalog, and would provide access to the users of a
>"true copy" of the catalog.  As we proceed with this effort, it would
>greatly help us if we could learn of the efforts of other repositories who
>have faced these issues.   Specifically, does anyone have experience with
>specifying norms or rules for preservation, access, migration, etc, when
>archival responsibility for a set of electronic records is "delegated" to
>working departments?"
>
>Thanks,
>Frank

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