Preserving IU’s vast research collections, whatever their form, is a paramount responsibility. Guided by our long-standing mission, we work every day to ensure materials exist for future generations.

Our most pressing needs today are to preserve film and audio materials that will be gone in a decade without action now. We also work to preserve digital items, which, without our deliberate care, may be lost forever.

Kennedy’s Valued Resource

“Find Articles” function of the IU Libraries Web site: Input a citation and link directly to full-text articles. “I now assume everything I want I’ll be able to find.”

Valued Service

Archiving raw survey data, useful far beyond the scope of a particular project, presents an ongoing challenge for John Kennedy. As director for IU’s Center for Survey Research, he conducts surveys for IU researchers, administrators, faculty at other universities, and state agencies. Over the years he’s seen formats change from floppy drives to zip drives to CDs and DVDs.

By depositing data into IUScholarWorks, “I won’t have to go back every time technology changes to make sure data still works,” he says.

 

The David Bradley Film Collection, one of the most comprehensive film collections assembled by an individual, has 4,259 16mm films.

There are 78,000 16mm films on the Bloomington campus; 62,000 of them are in IU Libraries collections.

440 languages are represented in IU Libraries collections.

6,000 digitized volumes of Tibetan literature are licensed for use by IU researchers from collections of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center.

John M. Kennedy, director of the Center for Survey Research, sees the benefit of depositing large amounts of research data into IUScholarWorks, the university’s secure repository for faculty research. “Someone has to take care of this data for the long-term,” he says. “Give it to people who know how to organize it.”