24 ยท Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
Nearly all staff members have some responsibility for digital materials, but only as part of their job. Estimate is therefore
very rough. One staff member is oriented predominantly toward digital.
No one staff member is charged solely with this responsibility. Rather, all professional staff who have a role in acquiring
new collections also have the responsibility to undertake these tasks.
One FTE is for the Director of Research Systems Development, who is not a Special Collections staff member but
manages the Institutional Repository where the dark archives are located. Another is for non-Special Collections staff
who manage the instance of CONTENTdm, which includes accessible born-digital materials.
One staff member is tasked with developing and maintaining the born-digital accession workflow process, all staff work
with born-digital content in some capacity in the arrangement and description process.
Only one of these positions is devoted full-time to managing/collecting digital special collections materials.
Over the next few years, we hope to increase to 3 FTE (2 FTE permanent staff and 1 FTE project staff or interns).
Responsibility for collecting and managing born-digital materials is currently shared by librarians and archivists with
responsibilities for special collections, university archives, geospatial data, ETDs, cataloguing &metadata. The library
will soon hire a Digital Special Collections Librarian who will take the lead on collecting and managing born-digital
special collections. This will lead to a higher FTE number than reported here.
Staff include University Archives personnel, the Faculty of Medicine Archivist, Libraries Collections Management
personnel, the University Records Manager, Libraries IT personnel, and contract metadata technicians.
The Libraries have recently reorganized, still in process of figuring this out.
The numbers above speak to departments with particular responsibility for the management and long-term support for
digital files, not for the collection development aspect. Collection development of born-digital materials will be carried
out by curatorial and archivist staff not reflected in these numbers.
The staff are not dedicated only to this activity but it falls under the scope of other archival work.
There is no one person who does this full time. Everyone involved is focused on this issue as part of all of their other
duties.
These individuals are not devoted exclusively to born-digital materials, but born-digital materials will invariably be
part of the collections these individuals acquire, organize, preserve, and describe. The Head of Special Collections and
Archives collects archival materials, which increasingly include born-digital materials. The Archivist is responsible for
arranging and describing archival materials, including born-digital materials. The Digital Project Specialist assists the
Head of SCA and the Archivist in acquiring, storing, preserving, describing, migrating, and providing access to these
files. The Digital Projects Specialist administers the various digital repositories that preserve and provide access to these
materials as well.
These numbers are very difficult to accurately compile. Most staff members do not have hard time allocations for born-
digital materials. Most staff members do not have explicit job descriptions regarding born-digital materials. Also, those
staff who do have allocations or explicit job descriptions may also be responsible for other tasks.
This includes metadata experts, digital curation staff, and repository services.
This question is difficult to answer with any accuracy. We currently collect very little born-digital materials and we have
no one individual that is dedicated to this task or will be dedicated to it within the foreseeable future. Almost all of
our special collections receive a small amount of born-digital materials and therefore the staff that is โ€œchargedโ€ with
managing and collecting the materials are no different than those that collect our paper-based materials.
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