Resources for Curating and Publishing Digital Content

The California Digital Library (CDL), founded in 1997, has become one of the world’s largest digital research libraries; part of their mission is to support and build connections between the ten UC libraries. To that end, they offer several services:

The University of California Curation Center, or UC3, provides several ways for faculty to access, store, and manage digital artifacts. Below is a quick overview of some of the services you may find particularly relevant.

• Merritt: This repository allows you to manage, archive, and share digital content. The benefit of using Merritt is that you can share persistent URLs, it is a dependable service that guarantees long-term preservation, and there are tools to make sure you meet the data sharing and preservation requirements of grant-funded projects. There is also a listerv for Merritt users—to be added, email uc3@ucop.edu.

• EZID: This service allows you to create persistent identifiers (and QR codes) for your digital artifacts. They also provide an EZID Outreach page that archives relevant webinars and presentations. As with Merritt, there is a fee for the service, but faculty members qualify for UC rates.

• Web Archiving Service: As the name implies, this service captures web pages, which is particularly useful to social scientists wishing to study online culture. In addition to building your own archives, you can search for and browse through pages others have made public.

• DMP Tool. This tool helps you create data management plans. If you’d like to learn more about data management, check out the data management library guide developed by UC Davis librarians to raise awareness about data management options.

In addition to the curation services, CDL also offers several publishing services. eScholarship allows you to publish on an open access platform, so this is perfect for distributing your research or publishing notes from faculty meetings or conferences. UC Press also publishes research and makes many of the articles available through the eBook collection.

If you have any questions about these services or about how you can better take advantage of the resources, contact uc3@ucop.edu.