Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records

Persistent Digital Archives and Library System (PeDALS)

Community of Shared Practice

In addition to reengineering the curatorial process or developing a robust, trustworthy, inexpensive storage network, PeD-ALS will develop a professional network to promote collaboration and to develop shared practices. The Best Practices Ex-changes held in North Carolina and Arizona, the New Skills colloquium, the DigCCurr conference, and other meetings have un-derscored the fragmented knowledge and efforts of preserving digital government information. This project will address the need for an integrated set of tested practices that can be adapted by many repositories.

This community will be born as a kickoff meeting, where partners will have the chance to get to build personal, face-to-face relationships that can extend into the virtual realm. The community will have regular interaction through a web forum and conference calls. The project intends to expand this community by opening the web site to other state libraries and archives. One desired outcome will be that states not implementing the system will be able to take immediate advantage of the shared practices by adapting them to their local needs. At the same time, these observers' participation in discussions will allow the project part-ners to take advantage of their insights and experiences, helping ensure that the system can be used as widely as possible. The observers will be invited to attend face-to-face meetings, although at their own expense.

In order for this community to be meaningful, they will have the shared objective of developing a common set of tools. The middleware will be a critical piece. Each partner will need the same middleware, and they will need the training necessary to use that software. At the same time, writing complex middleware rules will require a professional programmer. Because no one partner will like need a full time middleware specialist, the project will hire a programmer as a shared resource. Because the project is based on share practices, rules developed for one partner should be adaptable to another.

The project will investigate the administrative and economic factors necessary for a collaborative distributed network and develop a business model to sustain the network as a consortium after the grant. Implementation partners will reflect a variety of contexts -- such as size, centralization, and technology infrastructures -- to determine how those factors might affect the network architecture and a consortial management structure.