Contribute

How to Contribute

Southwest Virginia Digital Archive (SWVA) aims to create a community archive in Southwestern Virginia and beyond by integrating community collections with research library infrastructure. This involves developing a participatory library model and a project plan that supports collaborative digital repatriation and non-custodial collection development. Services offered through our host institution, Virginia Tech, included the following:

  • Digitization of materials
  • Metadata and description of materials
  • Public, online access on platform(s)
  • Long- term storage and preservation

Define Needs

What kind of support do you need?

GSDC can help you determine how your proposed collection fits within the GSDC regional and content scope.

Virginia Tech offers:

  • Digitization
  • Descriptive metadata support
  • Access on the VT Digital Library
  • Long-term preservation based on best practices

Consultation

Meet with GSDC

Set up a consultation with the GSDC, which includes both members of the community and faculty at Virginia Tech University Libraries.

We can walk you through the process, the paperwork, and the people involved and work with you or your organization to meet your needs.

Documentation

Planning out the project

We will collaboratively develop your project proposal, and once approved by the GSDC, a Memorandum of Agreement to establish the full project plan and define expectations and timelines.

Preparation

Material organization

Collections need to be organized and processed prior to transfer to VTUL for digitization and/or ingest to the Digital Library. This includes activities like reviewing for sensitive content, creating a list of items, defining any sub-collections, and preparing them for transport (physically or digitally).

    Description

    Metadata creation

    Descriptive metadata, or information about each item in your collection, is used to help users search for and discover materials. VTUL has 5 required descriptive metadata elements, and many more that you can use to enrich your collection.

    Communication

    Project Champion

    Your assigned Project Champion, the VTUL person who will liaise between you, GSDC, and VTUL, will be the primary point of contact and will encourage regular communication and updates.

    Ingest

    Deposit into pre-production

    Once the collections are digitized and described, we perform quality checks and ingest them into the Virginia Tech Digital Library staging server.

    Approval

    Stakeholder review and approval

    All collection stakeholders will be given the opportunity to review the collection before it becomes publicly available and provide feedback.

    Share

    Share collections

    Once approved, the collection will become publicly available and ingested into our preservation system. All physical materials and digital facsimiles will be returned to the stakeholder.