OAC Contributing Members Benefits & Obligations Statement

Benefits to all OAC contributing members:

• Digital publication of one's finding aids and their delivery via the Internet.
• CDL server storage (at cost) of master images, derivatives and associated metadata if contributing members institution unable to store.
• Access to OAC training, documentation, and productivity tools.
• Access to knowledge and expertise of OAC staff and colleagues.
• Enhanced scholarship potential for your clientele through the integration of repository holdings into OAC and resulting contextualization of search and discovery.
• Ability to obtain statistical reports of collection use.
• Expanded grants opportunities, due to:
  • Ability to participate in consortia grant applications.
  • Ability to reference OAC participation in individual grant applications.

Obligations associated with OAC contribution:

• Expressed willingness to make your collections accessible through the OAC.
• Agreement to observe professional archival descriptive practices when applying the EAD encoding standard to new and existing finding aids.
• Agreement to assume responsibility for creating own finding aids.
• Agreement to follow OAC and CDL metadata standards and best practices when creating finding aids, electronic texts and digital objects for inclusion in the union database.
• Agreement to follow OAC and CDL digitization standards when creating digital surrogates for inclusion in the union database.
• Agreement to adhere to OAC automation infrastructure specifications for ingesting of finding aids and digital objects.
• Agreement to create MARC record corollaries to EAD instances, and to link the two (via the 856) from within MELVYL (required by UC contributing members and recommended to other OAC contributing members).
• Agree to comply with legislation concerning fair use and copyright use restrictions.