Turn and Face the Strange (DAMS Changes): Temporarily Migrating Digital Collections into an Institutional Repository

Abstract

Like many libraries, our library operates two repository systems - an Institutional Repository (IR) for scholarship and university publications and a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) for digitized library collections. Faced with the need to migrate out of our aging DAMS with no replacement system yet chosen, we wondered if the IR could serve as a transient home for our digitized collections while we solidified other plans. What compromises would we need to make in order to carry through with this plan? What might we learn about these collections by bringing them together in one location? What steps could we take to ensure a successful migration? In this presentation we will discuss our temporary migration and the lessons we learned along the way. Topics will include the overlapping aims of IRs and DAMS as content repositories, the functional and metadata requirements of different types of digital content, stop gap measures we used to support missing functions, and how our experience is informing our selection and migration to a new DAMS.