This three-credit course is one of six required for completion of the Certificate in Digital Information Management (DigIn). This course will introduce the basic problems associated with digital preservation. It will give students a thorough orientation to the technological and organizational approaches, which have been developed to address long-term preservation concerns. Finally, the course will examine the current state of the art in digital preservation and assess what challenges remain in research and implementation efforts.
a) Orient you to the field of digital preservation and the basic problems it addresses.
b) Familiarize you with the key technical and organizational strategies for preserving digital objects.
c) Bring you up-to-date on current efforts to build preservation repositories and sustainable preservation programs.
d) Give you a historical perspective on how preservationists have addressed problems to date, and suggestions on what direction the field may be moving in the near future.
All readings for thiscourse are available online. The majority can be accessed openly on the Web.Others can be accessed through the UA Library e-journal databases, and a feware available only through the Library as e-reserves.
This course will combine some familiar activities—readings, lectures, short writing assignments, and a term project—with newer forms of online interaction and class discussion using the eCollege platform.
The course will be taught asynchronously, so you will not berequired to log in at any specific time. But this is not a self-paced course,so students will be expected to keep up with the weekly schedule in the syllabus. Also, as this is a new course, students should expect some minor changes to the syllabus as we go along, so students should plan to log in more than once a week and to check their email regularly.
The course content is divided into 14 units, with each unitlasting one week. At the start of each unit, the instructor will post a lectureon that week’s topic as well as notes giving feedback and updated informationabout the course. As a guideline, the lecture and accompanying readings foreach unit should be read within four days, giving you three days to completethe unit’s three mandatory assignments.
The first assignment is a weekly quiz. This will consist ofone short essay question drawn primarily from the readings. Answers should beroughly 200-300 words. Completed quizzes must be posted to the eCollege dropboxby each week’s deadline.
The second assignment for each unit involves classparticipation. You have two different options for meeting this requirement.First, you can contribute to the discussion forum that will be set up for eachunit. Second, you can submit an annotated entry to the course Webliography.
The third assignment is to add at least one substantive(i.e., more than one complete sentence) entry to your DigIn blog each week. Thecontent of your entries will not be graded as such, but if you do not add anentry by the assignment deadline each week, five points will be deducted fromyour overall total for that unit.
Finally, students will be asked to complete a semesterproject that develops a set of policies for preserving a digital collection.The policies must address short-, medium- and long-term risks to digitalobjects. Students will also choose in detail what aspects of their collectionthey wish to be preserved, and discuss what strategies are most appropriate tomeet their preservation objectives.
Academic Code of Integrity
Students are expected to abide by The University of Arizona Code of Academic Integrity. 'The guiding principle of academic integrity is that a student's submitted work must be the student's own.' If you have any questions regarding what is acceptable practice under this Code, please ask an Instructor.
Accommodating Disabilities
The University has a Disability Resource Center. If you anticipate the need for reasonable accommodations to meet the requirements of this course, you must register with the Disability Resource Center and request that the DRC send me, the Instructor, official notification of your accommodation needs as soon as possible. Please plan to meet with me by appointment or during office hours to discuss accommodations and how my course requirements and activities may impact your ability to fully participate.
Assignment Policies
<Put your own material for the stuff in red>
- How to submit your assignments: How do you want students to submit assignments? Do you want them to include any particular identifying information on their assignments? Will assignments be returned to them, or will they just see a posted grade? Anything else that they'd need to know?
- Assignment due dates: Since the Course Schedule section (above) will spell out specific due dates, this section is used to describe any late penalties and any particulars about exactly when items are due (e.g. "Surface-mailed assignments must be postmarked no later than the stated due date.")
- Writing style: Are students supposed to use any particular writing style, such as APA or Chicago Manual? Are there any on-line writing resources that might be helpful to your students as they prepare their assignments? What if English is not their native tongue...is help available to them?
- Late Policy
Incompletes
The current Catalog reads
The grade of I may be awarded only at the end of a term, when all but a minor portion of the course work has been satisfactorily completed. The grade of I is not to be awarded in place of a failing grade or when the student is expected to repeat the course; in such a case, a grade other than I must be assigned. Students should make arrangements with the instructor to receive an incomplete grade before the end of the term ...
If the incomplete is not removed by the instructor within one year the I grade will revert to a failing grade.
Weekly Quiz
In general, answers to quiz questions should be: concise; free of spelling and grammatical errors; provide a clear, explicit answer to the question; and include enough supporting details and/or examples to make your answer compelling while demonstrating your effort to master the readings and lecture. To meet these criteria, you should expect your answers to be 200-300 words in length, though this is not a rigid requirement. In some cases a shorter answer will suffice, and you not be penalized for a longer answer if it is well written and compelling in content.
Class Participation
In grading the discussion forum, my main concern is that posts should make a substantive contribution to the discussion. This means that you need to do more than state an opinion, or respond to another’s position. You also need to provide a context for your argument, including supporting details and concrete examples. Thus, to fulfill the grade requirement you will need to contribute a post of at least 100 words, and to respond to at least one other post with at least 25 words. Shorter posts and comments are also welcome, but these will not count toward the week’s grade.
If you decide to contribute to the course Webliography for your class participation, you will need to identify a reading that is relevant to that week’s unit. You’ll need to provide a full citation and, if possible, a link to the item. The critical element is the annotation. This should be a mini-review of at least 150-200 words. It should include a brief summary of the reading’s content, include some contextual information about the item (how itrelates to other literature on the topic), and then describe its relevance to the course content.
Semester Project
Detailed guidelines and minimum requirements for the term project will be forthcoming. In essence, you will be asked to develop a detailed set of policies for preserving a digital collection.
A key feature of this assignment will be to analyze some existing collections and preservation strategies that could act as models for your own policies. You will also be asked to create a short presentation ofyour project that will be made available to the class during the last week ofthe semester.
pkb@email.arizona.edu
