Introduction

Summary

As a member of the Digital Collections Stewardship cohort, you bring with you a unique and valuable set of experiences and goals. You may come from an organization that has been doing digital collections work for a while, or this might be an entirely new endeavor. You may have had formal training, on-the-job training, or no training; you may work full-time, part-time, or as a volunteer. Wherever you are starting from and whatever your goals, we hope that through our time together you will become more familiar with the landscape of digital collections management so that you can more confidently tackle your next digital collections project.

Digital Collections Models

“The main goal of digital stewardship is to responsibly care for and appropriately share digital collections with your community.” (WebJunction, Digital Collections Stewardship 1: Introduction).

Several models exist for organizing and explaining the steps involved in digital stewardship. The one you will encounter in the WebJunction course is: Prepare, Gather, Enhance, Save, Share. While this model is helpful to quickly visualize the steps in a simplified way, as a practitioner you will find that more nuance is needed. For instance, you will rarely approach these steps in a sequential order. Also, you may find it more helpful to combine two steps or add new ones. Digital stewardship is a continuous lifecycle that revolves around the careful preservation and active sharing of our collective history through thoughtful planning and diligent preparation.

Our Approach

Our DCS experience is based in part on the WebJunction Digital Collections Stewardship course, which is freely available online. After leading several cohorts through this material, we have made some adjustments to the WebJunction course in terms of sequence, content, and module names; we made these changes to better address the needs of real digital collections practitioners. Our updated course sequence is on the DCS homepage.

Suggested Recordings and Readings

  • Introduction Video. Presented by Leigh Jeremias and Amy Hitchner, Colorado State Library.
  • Overview of the Digital Collections lifecycle. Digital Collections Stewardship Enrichment. Video Recording. 45 mins. Helen Baer, Digital Projects Librarian and Associate Professor, Morgan Library, Colorado State University. 2025. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC)
    • This video features a presentation by Helen Bear, a digital projects librarian and associate professor at Colorado State University’s Morgan Library, on the life cycle of digital collections. The presentation covers the workflows, policies, and management strategies used to digitize archival materials.
    • Slides
  • Digital Collections Stewardship Module 1: Introduction. Self-paced slides and videos. WebJunction, 2023. 1 hour
  • Digital Stewardship Lifecycle. Video Recording. Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, Washington State University, 2017, 7.29 mins. Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Discussion Questions

  • What are examples of existing digital collections at your organization? 
  • Do you have any ideas for new digital collections? Or are there any currently underway?
  • How do your existing digital collections connect with your community? Are there opportunities for more collaboration or outreach?
  • Even in the early stages of this course, have you identified any areas or parts of the digital collections stewardship lifecycle that you want to address or improve?
    • Examples could include: managing multiple people (including student workers and volunteers), creating consistent metadata, cleaning up inconsistent metadata, learning about the capabilities of different systems, learning how to digitize.