About Digital Initiatives and Preservation

Digital Initiatives & Preservation provides support for a range of digital activities and services within the Library, Museums and Press. These include digital scholarship, research data management, and questions about scholarly publication. We are also responsible for digitizing materials from the Library, Museums and Press collections, and preserving these materials, which can involve conservation of physical items from the Library’s collections, and making sure that the digital items continue to function as technology changes.

We partner with students, faculty, and staff to use digital methods or tools in their research, teaching, and learning. Digital methods include (but are not limited to) things like text mining, data visualization or curation, creating digital archives, machine learning, data publishing, or using mapping software. We teach workshops and provide consulting on these and other topics. An important part of digital research is managing the data that you work with or create – figuring out where the data will be stored, and what information you need to provide so that others will be able to use it, either for peer review, or to build on your research. For more information, see our Research Data Services site.

Anyone can propose that material from Special Collections be digitized and made freely available as part of our digital collections. To learn more about our digital collections, our criteria for digitization, and to propose a project, visit our Digital Collections site.