Elon University’s Belk Library will be participating with the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources on a grant project to help create an open source software tool that will allow institutions to collect and preserve digital content.
The project is funded in part through a grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources has joined with Elon, the State Library of North Carolina, the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Libraries for Virtual Education, and the library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to develop the tool.
According to the IMLS news release announcing the grant, the joint project will “allow libraries, archives, and other organizations to more easily collect and deposit digital content into a preservation repository. The tool will build upon other existing open source tools but will incorporate new functions to help organizations with limited resources more easily complete many of the time-consuming technical processes that are necessary before digital files can be stored in a digital archive.”
Elon will be involved in the open source project by sending PDF files of the university’s Academic Catalog to the state cultural resources office.