The Repository

Digital Repository Models and Object Lifecycles

Lynch provided a now well known definition of IRs [1]:

"In my view, a university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution."

From this definition and from the list of processes in the Table, we can more concisely define a digital repository:

A Digital Repository is built from a set of processes to ingest, store, manage and provide access to a set of digital resources or objects

There have been a number of attempts to model digital repository development and deployment. One that focusses on preserving digital information is the Open Archival Infomation System (OAIS). More recently the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model describes a chronology of curation processes affecting the objects managed in a digital repository.

Preservation as a Process of a Repository (presented at the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall 2008 meeting) maps the processes from these two models to a simplified model of a repository, shown below, based on the three stages of the Preserv definition of a digital repository.

Figure: Preserv three-stage repository model

Lynch, Clifford A., Institutional repositories: essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age. ARL Bimonthly Report, No. 226, February 2003 http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/br226/br226ir.shtml

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