New Office Will Coordinate Digitization of Yale Resources

Published: September 26, 2008

Meg Bellinger

New Haven, Conn. — Yale has established a new Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI), and Meg Bellinger of the Yale University Library has been named as its first director, announced Provost Andrew Hamilton.

The new office will develop strategies and systems for:

• Providing even broader access to Yale's collections, including digital renderings of materials in campus libraries, museums and other special collections;

• Preserving Yale's collections of audio and video recordings of music, plays, exhibits and oral histories, as well as testimonies that are now on deteriorating media; and

• Ensuring faculty and researchers get needed institutional support for the deposit, retrieval and preservation of their publications and research.

"Yale will be making a significant commitment to develop the infrastructure necessary to support the creation and organization of our intellectual assets, which, in turn, will enable robust access to, and dissemination of, those assets, both on and off campus," said Hamilton. "Development of a virtual content repository is the 21st-century extension of Yale's investment in, and support of, its great physical collections of books, manuscripts, art, artifacts and audio-visual materials."

As director of ODAI, Bellinger will guide collaboration among the schools, libraries, museums and other campus units that are developing strategies and systems for digitization and digital asset management. She will also coordinate the development of a University-wide digital information management strategy.

The new ODAI director will report to the provost and have a "dotted-line reporting relationship" with the secretary of the University, who is responsible for the Office of Digital Dissemination, noted Hamilton. Bellinger will work closely with an advisory committee that will include the provost; the secretary of the University; the general counsel; the directors of the University's libraries and museums, and the Yale University Press; the chief information officer; and several senior faculty. Among its many collaborations, the ODAI will work closely with Information Technology Services and the Office of Digital Dissemination to develop, deploy and manage the new digital asset management infrastructure.

For the past five years, Bellinger has helped lead campus digital initiatives as associate university librarian for integrated library systems and technical services. Before coming to Yale, she was vice president of Digital and Preservation Resources, where she created a new business division at Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), and led planning and implementation of digital archiving, development of digital content management tools, programmatic cooperative development and digital production services. While at OCLC, Bellinger participated in international digital library and preservation professional activities, including board membership on the U.K. Digital Preservation Coalition, and on the Strata Supervisory Board (a joint venture between OCLC and the Royal Library of the Netherlands). She took part in the Managua UNESCO Consultation Meeting on the Preservation of Digital Heritage. Prior to OCLC, Bellinger was vice president of editorial and development at Research Publications International, an academic publishing company of the Thomson Organization.

The ODAI, said Hamilton, "builds upon the impressive work in recent years in many parts of the University, but most especially in the Yale Library under the direction of the University librarian, Alice Prochaska, who initiated the most vigorous digitization efforts on campus." The new enterprise will draw directly on the Yale Library's efforts in digital preservation as well as the creative programs that have been introduced there to support teaching and learning, he added.

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