UC Berkeley’s Digital Lifecycle Program: Mass Digitization of Special Collections for Use and Preservation
Nearly all of UC Berkeley’s 13 million circulating volumes are digitized and held for public use by the HathiTrust. However, Berkeley also has vast rare and special historical collections, most of which have not been digitized. By rough count, we have about 5 million pages digitized so far, with at least 200 million to go. To pursue making (almost) all of these collections easily accessible by anyone, anytime, from anywhere — and to ensure that our digital collections are effectively usable today and preserved for future generations — we have launched the Digital Lifecycle Program.
We will give a brief overview of the history and key architectural elements of the program. We will then discuss in some depth one of the special challenges for mass digitization of special collections that Berkeley has tackled on behalf of institutions everywhere: protocols and workflows for responsible access. We address efficient, thoughtful and responsive treatment of four issues: copyright restrictions, privacy rights, ethical concerns, and contractual (gift agreement) restrictions.
Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason is the university librarian and chief digital scholarship officer of the University of California, Berkeley, and a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Department of Economics. Formerly he was the dean of the School of Information, University of Michigan. At Michigan, he was also the Arthur W. Burks Professor of Information and Computer Science, and a professor of economics and public policy. He was the founding director of STIET (a research program for Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions). He is passionate about public universities, where he has spent his entire career.
Rachael G. Samberg leads UC Berkeley’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services. A Duke Law graduate, Rachael practiced intellectual property litigation at Fenwick & West LLP for seven years before spending six years at Stanford Law School’s library, where she was head of Reference & Instructional Services and a lecturer in law. Rachael speaks throughout the country about scholarly communication issues, and is a national presenter for the ACRL Workshop, Scholarly Communication: From Understanding to Engagement. She is project director for Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining, an NEH-funded project to help digital humanities researchers and professionals learn to navigate law and policy issues in text data mining. Her chapter, “Law & Literacy in Non-Consumptive Text Mining,” was published in Copyright Conversations (ALA, 2019).
