From a Post by Jesse Johnston on “The Signal” (a Library of Congress of Congress Blog):
Over the past two years, my colleagues and I in the Digital Content Management section have been working with experts from across many divisions of the Library of Congress to collate and assemble guidance and policy that guide or reflect the practices that the Library uses to manage digital collections. I am excited to share that today the results of that work have launched as the Digital Collections Management Compendium (DCMC)
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The DCMC is a product of the Library’s Digital Collections and Management Services Division (DCMS), with the purpose of promoting enduring access to the Library’s vast digital collections. A core team in DCMS works with experts from across the Library’s collecting and policy units and departments that manage digital collections.
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Although guidance elements affect actions throughout the digital content lifecycle, we organized the elements of the DCMC into three main areas: Digital Formats, Inventory and Custody, and Access. The section for Digital Formats includes a summary of how the Library’s Recommended Formats Statement can be applied, as well as overarching statements about how we manage various digital preservation issues for digital formats, including the preservation of content “as received” over time, the creation of digital surrogates, and inventorying of format types. This section also underscores the key role that the Sustainability of Formats online resource plays in supporting digital preservation planning. The Inventory and Custody section contains some of the Library-specific guidance that explains more about how the Library inventories and tracks digital content, monitors data integrity, aligns with the PREMIS standard the Library maintains, packages and stores most content according to the Library-developed BagIt standard, and maintains collections security. Finally, the Access portion describes the Library’s principles for providing access to digital content, as well as the metadata that is created to manage and preserve the collections when fully processed.
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