Outside The Box: Building a Digital Curation Ecosystem for Preservation and Access

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries made an institutional commitment in late 2015 to migrate the data for its digitized cultural heritage collections to open source systems for preservation and access: Hydra-in-a-Box, Archivematica, and ArchivesSpace. This presentation describes the work that the UH Libraries implementation team has completed to date, including open source tools for minting and resolving ARK identifiers, managing SKOS vocabularies, and streamlining digital curation workflows. These systems, workflows, and tools, collectively known as the Bayou City Digital Asset Management System, represent a novel effort to solve common issues in the digital curation lifecycle and may serve as a model for other institutions seeking to implement flexible and comprehensive systems for digital preservation and access.