Asian Heritage in Oregon throughout History: Themematic Digital Collection DMP

Our digital collection focuses on the immigration of Asian populations to Oregon from 1850-1980, with a focus on primary sources to help narrate the important and complex story of Asian immigration during a century of turmoil for these communities in America. We are including photographs, letters, art, artifacts, legal documents, newspaper articles, and more to formulate a thematic and chronological history of these diverse communities within Oregon.

Roles & Responsibilities

The DMP should clearly articulate how sharing of primary data is to be implemented. It should outline the rights and obligations of all parties with respect to their roles and responsibilities in the management and retention of research data. It should also consider changes to roles and responsibilities that will occur if a project director or co-project director leaves the institution or project. Any costs stemming from the management of data should be explained in the budget notes.

The Healers interview collection consists of audio clips of interviews, as well as accompanying transcripts and translations, conducted through years of fieldwork throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific Northwest. These interviews broadly address the question: What does healing look like in the context of Afro-indigenous traditions? The interview collection will be shared with the general public using the University of Oregon’s cultural heritage digital library, Oregon Digital. It will also be deposited into the Digital Library of the Caribbean at the University of Florida. We are taking a multi-institutional approach to having the collection in both digital repositories because we believe in LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe). However, the authoritative interviews will be held by the University of Oregon and aggregated through the Digital Library of the Caribbean not the University of Oregon.

• Claire Matucan, Project Manager, Claire Matucan has taken the role of Project Manager. As Project Manager, Claire helps coordinate group work and progress for the digital collection by overseeing group communication via Teams, schedules, and initiates group meetings online and in person. Additionally, she ensures the quality of work submitted by the group for the digital collection. As Project Manager, she also submits group work on behalf of the team.
• Daveena Williams, Metadata manager, In this project Daveena Williams was our Metadata manager which includes facilitating object cataloging within our digital archive. Ensuring all objects follow the project’s metadata application profile. She also was in charge of metadata quality review; making final decisions about how objects are described and standardizing all data entry based on CollectionBuilder’s metadata requirements.
• Regan Robinson, Object Preservation Manager, Regan Robinson took on the role of Object Preservation Manager for this project. She is responsible for overseeing the organization of the digital files the group is working with and maintaining the readability of the file naming standards. For CollectionbBuilder specifically, she worked to ensure that all object files were within CollectionBuilder’s standards and that the transferrance of files went smoothly.
• Jackson Scharf, Collection Development Manager, As Collection Development Manager, Jackson Scharf has been responsible for the evaluation of file formats and copyright and licensing. The Collection Development Manager was also responsible for the evaluation, and final selection of objects in the collection, as well as a written description of the collection. Additionally, Jackson has been working to ensure that we are obeying US copyright law, and are appropriately labeling our objects with the proper rights statements.

Data types

Throughout the course of creating our thematic digital collection we accumulated mostly images of artifacts, documents, and photographs all in the form of jpegs and jpgs. In total we collected 27 objects varying in size from 33 KB to 6.95 MB. Our metadata was transformed into CSV files so it could be easily uploaded into Github. We intend to share our data for educational and research purposes under the correct copyright laws.

We managed our data by creating multiple sites for them to be shared between group members. We had copies of our object jpegs/jpgs in addition to our metadata in our group Sharepoint, our individual Dropboxes, Exel, GoogleDrive, and in our own personal folders. We also standardized and organized our data by following the Metadata Application Profile standards, and standardized file naming conventions so we could easily find and access our data. We created archived pages with the wayback machine, of all the original sites in which we found our objects. The archived pages ensure information is preserved for future use. We then published the archived pages onto our Collection Builder site. We ran into some issues when collecting our data regarding copyright and access. Many of our objects were sourced from smaller collection sites where copyright was not indicated. In these situations, we reached out to the individuals/institutions responsible for the data and ensured the legal and ethical ability to reproduce the objects for educational use. Other data we felt an ethical responsibility to omit, either because of personal or familial information that we didn’t feel was appropriate to publicize. We created a set of controlled vocabulary with terms relevant to our collection and the individual objects which reflect the descriptions relevant to the communities and cultures in which we are representing. The terms provided are relevant, precise, and appropriate in order to accurately represent the Asian communities that are depicted in our collection. The terms were produced by our team members and defined with the help of Getty Research, to ensure the most accurate and appropriate descriptions possible. In our CollectionBuilder website, links to each object’s respective Copyright and Creative Commons notes are provided ensuring the protection and integrity of the data. Other information crucial to the object including location, format, citation, data, title, and more is provided in our metadata allowing for easy access to the details that make up the respective objects. This is an important aspect to our (and any) collection as it provides any future researcher with the information that may need to investigate further, or use the data for educational purposes.

Period of Data Retention: All data is currently available through our digital collection and the original repositories it was sourced from. We did not generate, and are not owners of any data that we gathered, so there is no applicable period of data retention.

Data Formats:

The Asian Heritage in Oregon Throughout History Digital Archive contains objects that are either jpg or jpeg. Since our collection contains exclusively images we made sure to use a non-proprietary format for image storage to ensure ease of access and preservation of access. While the use of a non-proprietary file format does not guarantee avoiding obsolescence, it is our best bet for long-term preservation of access. If we were to expand the collection into other data formats, we would ensure that the data met our standards for ease and preservation of access.

Dissemination:

The project team thought it necessary to make as much relevant data as possible publicly available. For this reason, we have both the Collection Builder Website, and its back end on Github available to the public. On both, we have the data itself, metadata and metadata application profile available. As a result of using Collection Builder, an open source collection tool, all of the code responsible for building the Asian Heritage in Oregon Throughout History website is available to the public.

Rights:

It was important for the members of the team to ensure that we were adhering to all US Copyright law. For this reason, many of our objects fall within the public domain as they were created prior to 1929. For objects that were not a part of the public domain, we made sure that their use in our digital collection was permitted. In the case of an undetermined copyright we made sure to do our due diligence to make sure that we weren’t violating US Copyright law. If we were unsure about the copyright status of an object we made sure to reach out to the collections that the objects were housed in to ensure that their use was permitted.

Privacy, Security, Public Access:

Due to the age and content of most of our objects, there weren’t many concerns of privacy or security. We did however double check to make sure that we were not including any compromising or unwanted information within our objects. To the best of our knowledge, there are no violations of privacy or security within our collection.

Data Storage and Preservation of Access:

Our objects have four copies, to ensure security in having multiple back ups. Our group stored objects in Cloud based softwares including: Google drive, DropBox, Github and Sharepoint. Regarding Preservation of Access we used a tool called the Wayback time Machine to archive and conserve the links to our objects. Allowing for audiences being able to access how the embedded links looked originally, as we were archiving these objects for thematic digital collection. With data sustainability in mind we also ensured all our objects were converted to jpegs to ensure quality of these images for the long run and avoiding degradation of image quality from use.

Appendix:

Here is a link to our DMP Page containing Metadata Application Profile which contains relevant information regarding metadata curation and management.