Day: March 1, 2012

Welcome to our new blog! The Digital Collections Unit (DCU) at The Bancroft Library handles all things digital at Bancroft. We created this blog to share some of the interesting work we do here in the DCU. We hope you’ll find our work as exciting as we do!

The Digital Collection Unit (DCU) of The Bancroft Library is responsible for creating and maintaining our online collections. While this initially encompassed creation of digital versions of our collection materials, it has now grown to include management of incoming born-digital materials and electronic records. The DCU provides digital services, management, preservation and access to digital collections from the Bancroft.

The DCU is also responsible for the encoding and maintenance of our electronic finding aids and archival collection information management systems, metadata, and tools. We work closely with the Library Systems Office to support our digital initiatives and technology needs. We work closely with the California Digital Library (the digital library for UC) to present our digital collections online and preserve them long-term.

DCU staff are also Bancroft’s social media team. They are tasked with posting the daily updates to Facebook and Twitter, and now maintaining this blog.

We are also embarking on an effort to provide more focused digital support services to our campus researchers involved in digital research and digital humanities endeavors. With over 15 year experience in digital initiatives, we are excited to share our expertise with our campus colleagues and build new research resources.

So, we hope you will check in once in a while for our new posts on what is happening — digitally and otherwise —  in DCU. There certainly is never a dull moment around here!