David Kahle
Director, Academic Technology
Tufts University
All Things to All People: Combining resources to build an integrated digital repository

Bio

David Kahle is the Director of Tufts Academic Technology and oversees Tufts' central AT initiatives which include technology education for faculty, curricular technology design and development and research computing administration. Prior to coming to Tufts, David served as Head of the Instructional Technology Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and as project manager at MIT's Center for Advanced Educational Services.

Presentation Abstract

The Digital Collections and Archives (DCA), Tufts University is using Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture) to build an institutional digital repository. A collaborative effort between the DCA and Tufts Academic Technology, the digital library manages digital library content, faculty research, and university records.

Our aim is to bring together people with different goals but similar needs: storing and maintaining digital content. Faculty, archivists, records managers, and academic technologists all benefit from the knowledge of the other groups. Recordkeeping requirements based on records management principles insure the authenticity of content. Organizational principles developed by archivists keep content in intellectual order. Creating manipulation and delivery tools is the specialty of Academic Technology. Each group brings its own special expertise to the building the repository and attendant tools. The result is a sum that is greater that each of its parts.