Administrative Notes: Newsletter of the FDLP

Vol. 25, no. 12-13 GP 3.16/3-2:25/12-13 November 15/December 15, 2004

Digital Archiving through Bibliographic Control Begins in November

The Office of Bibliographic Services (OBS) began the full implementation of the OCLC Digital Archive System in November, enhancing our existing archiving activities. Beginning in 2002, staff from Superintendent of Documents worked with OCLC and other partners to develop a set of tools and services for digital archiving. The tools harvest content, create preservation metadata, and place the harvested objects in a secure, managed storage environment. OBS short-term plans are to manage and store monographs from a wide variety of agencies using this new archiving tool.

In preparing for the November roll-out, Bibliographic Control librarians processed 34 monographs using the Digital Archive System. Librarians create a full MARC record for the item, harvest the digital object, and create Dublin core metadata.

Access to the digital object will be through the PURL, which resides in the MARC bibliographic record. PURLS will be directly linked to the OCLC Digital Archive, not routed to the agency web site. Users will be able to identify which electronic objects have been harvested and stored in the Digital Archive by the presentation of an interim page which gives brief information about the date/time the item was archived. OCLC refers to the interim page as “Object Associated with Page”, but to retrieve the interim page at the top, it reads: “Query Result Page.” For an example, see: http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS11163