The Curricular Asset Warehouse at the University of Illinois: Case study of a digital archive’s sustainability

Abstract

The production and stewardship of digital objects depends on devices and software with relatively short life cycles. As a result, when it is time to upgrade digital preservation environments and workflows, the devices that host digital objects — hard drives, monitors, computer peripherals, storage media, etc — flow out of digital repositories and contribute to the fastest growing waste stream of the 21st century: electronic waste. This paper discusses how the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently conducting a study into the sustainable management of its large volumes of digital video and image content production and preservation, within an analysis of its institutional purchasing and waste management paradigms. This analysis seeks to determine how device obsolescence at CITL can be mitigated to avoid future costs and to minimise the department’s contribution to the global e-waste problem. The first half of this paper describes how CITL employs a system called the Curricular Asset Warehouse (CAW), which is a suite of software that serves as the backbone of its media production and archival needs. CAW uses several open source software tools to be an all-in-one production, cataloguing, preservation and discovery tool. The second half of the paper discusses how CITL, which contains a high-throughput video production unit, is minimising its e-waste footprint by employing the CAW suite of tools to minimise its digital storage needs and, by extension, the amount of electronic waste produced by the department. This section also discusses the findings of an in-progress case study about the environmental impacts of CITL’s production tools and tape-based storage infrastructure.