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Luminary Lectures @ Your Library

Stewardship in the Digital Age: Roles and Issues for Libraries for Preserving Our Cultural Heritage

Meg Bellinger - February 23, 2004

The research library community has reached a level of maturity in its development of digital library initiatives. We have moved from projects and testbeds to environments that sustain library services in a coherent fashion. All of the library services in the analog world of selection, acquisition, organization and description, access and preservation apply to the digital present. The digital repository provides these services but have the additional possibility of displacing and reinventing functions that have not been the traditional remit of library services.

This presentation explores the development and evolution of the digital repository, explores how digital preservation or archiving in the repository environment fundamentally differs from the purposes of preservation services in the past attempts to refine definitions.

About the Speaker

Meg Bellinger has twenty years of increasing responsibility in leadership, strategic planning, development, implementation, and project management of library information products and services, including preservation and digital life cycle management services, and special collections publishing for academic library markets.

She has led major business development planning and implementation programs, including the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) Digital Archive. Created a new division at OCLC and have led planning and implementation of digital archiving, development of digital content management tools, programmatic cooperative development, and digital production and preservation microfilming services.

Meg’s current position as the Associate University Librarian for Integrated Library Systems and Technical Services is a new position, and is expected to provide leadership and vision for the Library in developing and maintaining the bibliographic organization, metadata controls, and technological infrastructure that are necessary for the integrated concept to flourish. Reporting directly to the University Librarian, the position is a member of the senior management team of Yale University Library and supervises the following departments: Acquisitions, Catalog, Library Systems, Manuscripts and Archives, and Social Science Libraries and Information Services.

Meg has enjoyed active participation at an international level in digital library and preservation professional activity, including board membership on the UK Digital Preservation Coalition, member of the Strata Supervisory Board (joint venture between OCLC and the Royal Library of the Netherlands), invited participant in the Managua UNESCO Consultation Meeting on the Preservation of Digital Heritage, invited member of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Newspaper Section, OCLC representative in International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) and the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).

She has contributed to various standards and best practice developments including the OCLC/ The Research Libraries Group (RLG) Preservation Metadata Working Group, The RLG-OCLC Attributes of a Trusted Digital Repository, National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Technical Committee on Metadata for Digital Still Images, and RLG Preservation Microfilming Guidelines. Initiated the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Digital Registry project within OCLC and oversaw OCLC participation on the METS board and the new DLF format registry.