Digital Collections Graduate Certificate
In this digital age of information, the need for professionals who can create, manage, preserve, and promote digital collections continues to grow. A Digital Collections Graduate Certificate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, prepares students to fill that need in a variety of settings, including libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage and information environments.
Program Overview
Taught by experts in the field, coursework for this certificate will give you practical and conceptual skills for supporting access to digital cultural and scholarly resources, helping you to take your career or academic journey to the next level.
This certificate provides specialized training for those who work or want to work with digital collections in academic, cultural heritage, and professional settings. Those who attain the certificate will build expertise in areas such as:
Metadata
Transforming raw files into preserved assets to ensure users can easily access information.
Curation
An understanding of how to determine what assets should be added to a digital collection.
Access
Making information easily available to the appropriate audience through delivery and interfaces, as well as protecting digital collections with security needs.
Long-term preservation
Ensuring digital collections remain available to the intended audience as long as necessary.
Why get a graduate certificate in Digital Collections?
A graduate certificate in Digital Collections prepares you for work involving the digitization, organization, preservation, management, and accessibility of cultural materials.
The program is also valuable for professionals seeking to strengthen their technical and conceptual understanding of digital collections while complementing existing expertise in libraries, archives, museums, information sciences, or related fields.
What can you do with a graduate certificate in Digital Collections?
The certificate can support careers and professional development in areas such as digital librarianship, institutional repositories, archives and special collection, digital curation and preservation, metadata and cataloging, museum and cultural heritage work, and community and public history projects.
Careers in this area include:
- Digital librarian: Manages digital collections, ensuring online resources are organized, accessible, and user-friendly.
- Cataloging librarian: Organizes and classifies materials using standardized systems and metadata to ensure accurate discovery and access.
- Digital archivist: Preserves, manages, and provides access to digital records and historical materials for long-term use.
- Museum curator: Oversees collections by selecting, interpreting, and organizing exhibits to educate and engage the public.
- Public historian: Interprets and presents history through programs, exhibits, and community initiatives for diverse audiences.
Featured Courses
Certificate curriculum and requirements
INSC 565 – Digital Libraries
Technological, social, and legal aspects of planning, building, and managing digital collections and digital libraries. Software architecture, platforms, digitization technology, protocols, and standards that enable digital libraries. Various formats of digital objects and their organization and representation.
INSC 562 – Digital Curation
Value-added, lifecycle management of born and reborn digital objects and databases. Content creation, digitization, selection, appraisal, ingest, storage, preservation, access, use and re-use. Digital and data repository standards, policies, and management.
INSC 560 – Museum Studies
Selecting and preserving collection items, regardless of format, to meet users’ needs; community analysis; policies and procedures; evaluation; purchasing.
INSC 567 – Digital Humanities
Digital Humanities (DH), especially as it pertains to libraries. Conceptualizing, planning, and developing DH scholarship and pedagogy. Introduction to entry-level DH research methodologies and tool
