From harvesting to cultivating
Christopher A. Lee, Richard J. Marciano, Chien-Yi Hou, Chirag Suresh Shah · 2009
Much has been written about the lifecycle of digital objects. This study is instead concerned with the lifecycle of collections and associated services. Online collection environments are built to fulfill specific collecting objectives and constraints. If a collection proves useful within its original hosting environment, it will often be necessary or desirable to move the collection to new environments, in order to support new forms of use and re-aggregation or extract resources from legacy data environments. Such a transformation can be extremely expensive, challenging and prone to error, especially if the collections include complex internal structures and services. When "services make the repository" [1], moving raw data from one location to another will often not be sufficient. Digital curators can pre-empt costly and problematic system migration efforts by integrating collections into environments specifically designed to support long-term preservation, scalability and interoperability [2]. We report on an integration of content and functionality of a feature-rich collecting environment (ContextMiner) into a robust data curation environment (iRODS).