Digital Preservation Service Provider Models for Institutional
Repositories: towards distributed services
Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Jessie M.N. Hey and Leslie
Carr
Preserv Project, IAM Group, School
of Electronics and Computer Science,
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email:
sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Preserv is a JISC-funded project within the
programme
Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions [1]
Version history
Published
in D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 13,
No. 5/6, May/June 2007
This version 16 May 2007, final
draft, including late edits for D-Lib
publication
25 January 2007, first draft. It
includes edited and updated
material from an earlier paper Preservation
Metadata for Institutional Repositories (February 2006), focussing
on preservation
service models and omitting coverage
of preservation metadata. There is a companion paper on Preservation
Metadata for Institutional Repositories: applying PREMIS.
Abstract
Digital preservation can encompass a range of
activities, from simple replication and storage to more complex
transformation, depending on the assessed value and risk to the target
content. These activities require planning and, in most cases, begin
with a need to know the technical format of the target content. In this
case, the target is the content deposited in institutional repositories
(IRs). The
Preserv project set out
to investigate the use of The National Archives’ (TNA) PRONOM-DROID
service (PRONOM
is the online registry of technical information; DROID is the
downloadable
file
format identification tool) for file format identification on two pilot
IRs using EPrints software, and instead produced format
profiles (Preserv
profiles) of
over 200 repositories presented via the Registry of Open Access
Repositories
(ROAR). Thus
a primary element of preservation planning has been shown to be
possible based
on a standard Web interface (OAI) and no formal arrangement between
repository
and provider. The implications of this go beyond the numbers towards a
reconceptualisation of repository preservation service provider models.
Repositories and
providers can
shape preservation services at different cost levels that could range
from comprehensive
‘black-box’ preservation to pick-and-mix lightweight Web-based services
that
build on the common starting point, format identification. The paper
describes the evolution of a series of models that have informed
progress towards this conception of flexible and distributed
preservation services for IRs.
Introduction
How are institutional repositories (IRs) to preserve the digital
content for
which
they accept responsibility? Until now much emphasis has been placed on
the role of repository software. Two of these softwares, notably DSpace
[2]
and Fedora [3], have promoted support for
preservation as a key feature. In
contrast, the first software designed for IRs, EPrints [4], has until
now offered
less explicit support for preservation. In truth, reliance on
repository software alone will not be sufficient: "it seems obvious
that no existing software application could serve on its own as a
trustworthy preservation system. Preservation is the act of physically
and intellectually protecting and technically stabilizing the
transmission of the content and context of electronic records across
space and time, in order to produce copies of those records that people
can reasonably judge to be authentic. To accomplish this, the
preservation system requires natural and juridical people,
institutions, applications, infrastructure, and procedures." (Wilczek and Glick 2006)
Repository support
teams need to engage in preservation management, planning and policy.
Even then more specialised technical preservation tasks might best be
outsourced. The Preserv project [5] has been investigating with
possible
preservation service providers just what services might serve IRs and
how they might be delivered. This paper illustrates the models that
have been developed to inform the investigations, and shows how the
general preservation service provider model has evolved, based on the
project's experiences, away from the idea of a monolithic service
provider towards more discrete, flexible and distributed Web-based
preservation services.
First we need to explain what is meant by the term 'preservation' as it
applies to the digital objects and environments that Preserv is
concerned with.
What is 'preservation'?
Most collectors know that storing physical collectibles in a container
in an attic is likely to provide more assurance of retrieval than
simply throwing items on a coffee table. This is the equivalent of
depositing an electronic paper in an IR rather than simply uploading it
to a
personal server and Web page. The organisation of the IR together
with the commitment of the sponsoring institution will provide
greater assurance than a server with unknown support looking forward.
Attic storage is hardly a complete solution,
however. In the long
term, even physical materials suffer some degradation. The
equivalent process of degradation for digital materials is typically
caused by format obsolescence - due to changes in software
applications technology, often regarded as a rapid process in
comparison with degradation of physical materials - and can be
ameliorated by specialised technical processes such as format
migration. In both cases, the extended risks to physical and digital
materials might be most cost-effectively tackled by specialist
preservation services. For
information materials like books and journals, these services have
traditionally been offered by libraries and
archives, and such organisations might be well positioned to serve
digital sources too.
Digital preservation thus covers a wide range of activities, from
storage to
transformation, depending on the
nature of the resources and the source, and the range of preservation
services could be equally wide. Since such services are not yet widely
practised or available, a useful starting point is to consider what is
known about the target content in IRs.
Evolution of institutional repositories
It is helpful to consider
what
IRs are, what they do and where the idea comes from because this
is a relatively recent development.
An IR provides access to the content and materials produced by members
of the institution, typically a university or other educational
establishment. The impetus for IRs was boosted by the Open
Archives
Initiative (OAI) in 1999, not to be confused in preservation terms with
the Open Archival Information System (OAIS 2002, Hirtle 2001).
Institutionally-based, or more typically departmental, 'archives' were
known before this, especially in areas such as computer science and
economics that were served by the Networked Computer Science Technical
Reference Library [6] and Research Papers in Economics [7],
respectively. OAI
introduced the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to provide
common services that could operate over more
general, independent sites (Lynch 2001). Search is the most obvious
example of
such a service. OAI-PMH enables compliant sites to be interoperable, thus making
institutional, rather than only disciplinary, repositories visible and
viable. For
the first time institutions such as universities have the ability to
capture, store and disseminate
copies of the
published work of their own researchers. The significance of this
cannot be underestimated.
OAI was aimed initially at eprint archives (Van de Sompel and Lagoze
2000), and although the protocol was
soon applied to other digital library content, the first
software to
support it was EPrints, developed at Southampton University and on
which we
base our work. EPrints is software for
building IRs
that capture and
provide open access to an
institution's research outputs and publications, which are
deposited directly by
authors in principle using the
version they created, a process known as 'self-archiving'.
One of the consequences of this approach is that IRs incur low cost per
item deposited, in turn creating the conditions for open access:
immediate and permanently free access to published research papers. As
such,
where digital preservation might generally be
concerned with preserving access, for IRs it is concerned with
preserving open access, which
has cost implications.
EPrints software first appeared in 2000, and an OAI-PMH 1.0-compliant
version
was
announced on the
same day this breakthrough version of the protocol was unveiled in
January 2001 (Harnad 2001, OAI 2001). This application to IRs was
reinforced with the emergence of DSpace software the following
year, and other IR softwares have followed since.
Growth in the number of IRs has accelerated since 2002 and, despite
some lag in time, there has been corresponding growth in the volume of
content in IRs (Figure
1), as revealed by the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR [8]).
According to data recorded by a wider registry of OAI-compliant
repositories, OAIster, there was a 25% growth in the
number of such repositories (up to 726), and a
59% increase in the number of records in those repositories (up to
9,931,910) between December
31, 2006 and the same date in 2005 (Suber 2007).
![Repository growth chart from ROAR](repository-growth-crop-apr.png)
Figure
1. Growth of institutional repositories and contents, generated from
the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) on 16 April 2007.
Charts all repositories flagged as 'Research Institutional' in the ROAR
database
The fundamental requirements of repositories were characterised by
Heery and Anderson (2005):
- content is deposited in a repository, whether by the content
creator,
owner or third party
- the repository architecture manages content as well as metadata
- the repository offers a minimum set of basic services e.g. put,
get,
search, access control
- the repository must be sustainable and trusted, well-supported
and
well-managed
IRs are additionally characterised by the institution and the type of
content it requires and permits to be deposited and for what purpose,
most commonly research outputs for open access.
This description of what IRs are and what they represent is not to say
that the role and target content of IRs won't evolve
legitimately and in an informed way to serve institutional needs and
research purposes, as suggested by Dempsey (2006). Other types of
content, such as research data sets
(Lyon et al. 2004), theses,
reports and multimedia can be
deposited and managed within EPrints-based IRs.
Suber (2006)
predicted "a continuing tension between the narrow
conception of institutional repositories (to provide open access for
eprints)
and the broad conception of IRs (to provide open access for all kinds
of digital
content, from eprints to courseware, conference webcasts, student work,
digitized library collections, administrative records, and so on, with
at least as much attention on preservation as access). But I have to
predict that the broad conception will prevail. Universities that
launch general-purpose archiving software will have active constituents
urging them to take full advantage of it."
Taking the age profile of most repositories into account, the need for
preservation is
perhaps less critical than for older digital content sources, but other
factors such as growth and diversity point towards a
more urgent need to plan for preservation by the more content-rich
repositories.
Three OAIS preservation models for IRs
Having defined the target content for preservation services in terms of
IRs, we
can
consider the types of services that can be offered. The OAIS reference
model
(Figure 2a) provides a framework in which we can construct these
services (OAIS
2002).
At a very general level it can be seen that IRs provide a similar range
of functionality as found in OAIS -- input and output, data management
and storage. OAIS imposes more formality and discipline on these
processes for the purpose of long-term preservation. Thus deposit
becomes ingest, and we are
concerned with archival storage,
all enveloped by preservation planning, administrative and management
roles. To understand these distinctions and these support processes,
see the excellent Cornell tutorial (2003).
Information in this system is managed in packages: submission
information packages (SIPs) at point of ingest, archival information
packages (AIPs) in the preservation store, and dissemination
information packages (DIPs) for access by users or other services.
Within the types of
services we could construct we wish to support a range of business
models to allow IRs some flexibility in managing the preservation risk
in terms of their real resources, leading to the following proposed
models:
- service
provider model (service provider is OAIS, Figure 2b) the original and
core Preserv project model (Hitchcock et
al.
2005)
- institutional
model (institution is OAIS, Figure 2c), an institution may have
more than one repository, e.g. EPrints-Fedora
- software
model (repository is OAIS, Figure 2d), preservation features built
into IR software
Figure
2. Three preservation models based on OAIS: a, Base OAIS functional
model; b, Service provider model; c, Institutional model; d. IR model
The basis of the three service models in the formal OAIS model are
apparent in Figure 2. Representations of the OAIS reference model are
ubiquitous in
the digital preservation literature and may differ in presentation if
rarely in detail; for reference, this version (Figure 2a) was taken
from a
presentation by Day (2003). The changes in the service models are
shown
in red and are all focussed on the ingest-data management-archival
storage roles and the relations between these as shown by the
connecting arrows. Since access is a primary feature of IRs it has been
assumed that support services would not need to replicate this
function. In the service provider model a case could be made
to re-introduce the arrow connecting the service provider and the
access point (e.g. EVIE 2006), depending on the agreement between the
IR and
service provider partners, and the form of the preservation service.
The three models illustrated have no specific costs attached, but
represent a hierarchy in terms of level of cost (from Figure 2b highest
down to 2d) that might be incurred
to support preservation, based on Chapman's (2003) observation: "though
quantity, quality and size of the digital materials ingested
has
an impact on scale, the cost of long term digital sustainability
correlates more to the range of digital services offered." The range of
services offered by the service provider (Figure 2b) is clearly
potentially greater and
more flexible than the latter two, with the software model providing a
baseline requirement.
Other models might include federated and network models. These models
are beyond the immediate scope of
this paper, but it is worth highlighting some examples. A
prominent federated example is LOCKSS (Rosenthal et al. 2005), which focusses on
journal
applications rather than more heterogeneous collections such as in IRs,
and is predicated on the idea that the risk of data loss can be reduced
simply by copying and transfer of content between trusted partners.
The MetaArchive project [9] has
extended the LOCKSS approach to at-risk digital content from various
digital repositories focussing on the the culture and history of the
American South.
Integration of Storage Resource Broker (SRB) with DSpace (Declerck and
Frymann 2004) illustrates a network preservation approach. "SRB is
a very robust, sophisticated storage manager that offers
essentially unlimited storage and straightforward means to replicate
(in simple terms, backup) the content on other local or remote storage
resources." (Tansley et al.
2005).
Similarly the Shared
Infrastructure
Preservation Models project investigated how
dissemination of repository content can be 'piggybacked' on top of
existing network services such as email and Usenet traffic: "Long-term
persistence of the replicated repository may be achieved thanks to
current policies and procedures which ensure that email messages and
news posts are retrievable for evidentiary and other legal purposes for
many years after the creation date. While the preservation issues of
migration and emulation are not addressed with this approach, it does
provide a simple method of refreshing content with various partners for
smaller digital repositories that do not have the administrative
resources for more sophisticated solutions." (Smith et al. 2006)
Preservation service provider model
The preservation service provider model was broadly outlined in terms
of shared, or third-party, preservation services by Beagrie (2002),
while RLG-OCLC (2002) reported the need for third-party
preservation services to fulfill the need for trusted digital
repositories. This model was proposed
for IRs by James et al.
(2003). Referring to this as a disaggregated
OAIS-compliant model,
Knight (2005) extended the idea to a model-based, rather than
evidence- or experience-based, analysis. Knight presented a detailed
breakdown of the model and workflow from the service provider's
perspective. In this case the service provider is represented by the
Sherpa-DP project. Experience is likely to
bring both more complexity and more clarity.
One particular type of content already subject to emerging preservation
services are electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). While theses
have long been collected by national libraries, work at the
German National Library is advancing towards providing a preservation
framework for ETDs
(Wollschlaeger 2006). The Repository Bridge project demonstrated how
ETDs could be harvested using OAI and METS from Welsh IRs to a
Fedora-based repository at the National Library of Wales (Lewis and
Bell 2006), while Santhanagopalan et
al. (2006) harvested OAI content to a LOCKSS network involving
six Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
repositories.
Can this this approach be extended to all contents in IRs, not just
ETDs? Steenbakkers 2004) .
In the first instance these initiatives, as with the federated and
network examples, principally tested mechanisms
to transfer content between originating repositories and preservation
services or preservation networks. Moving the focus away from ETDs as
the source content, the Archive Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT)
similarly investigated the effects of content transfer.
The
AIHT practical preservation strategy will require "mechanisms for
continuous transfer of content from the wider world into the hands of
preserving institutions. The AIHT is designed to test the feasibility
of transferring digital archives in toto from one institution to
another" (Shirky 2005). This approach involving more than one agency in
content
management parallels our service provider model outlined below. AIHT
reveals important practical experience, although there are
some differences with anticipated preservation
service models for IRs. For example, in AIHT:
- There is no scope for interaction between creator and archive
- There is no moderated ongoing transfer process or protocol, just
a single disc of compressed data containing all files
- There is no business model (i.e. who is doing what for whom, and
why)
- The scope of the test archive may or may not reflect a typical
profile of an IR
Of the AIHT exemplars. that described by DiLauro et al. (2005) is
instructive for IR applications, being concerned with ingest into,
and transfer between, Fedora and DSpace-based archival stores.
While replication and storage can provide some support for
preservation, it is not a complete solution in the longer term because
of the effects of format obsolescence requiring more expert support.
Given the low age of most IRs this has not yet become a major issue,
and there are few examples currently of preservation services that go
beyond simple storage. Cornell's File Format and Media Migration
Pilot Service is an interesting exception, since it attempted to
retrieve older legacy materials, and was concerned not just with format
obsolescence but also media obsolescence, for example, the problem of
old disc and tape technologies (Entlich and Buckley 2006).
Perhaps
the most revealing point is left to the penultimate paragraph, however:
"We
believe a superior alternative is to establish institutional
repositories in which faculty are encouraged to deposit their work."
The service provider model to be adopted
in the Preserv project was developed in stages, as described by
Hitchcock
(2005). This model is formalised in Figure 3. A notable feature of the
illustrated model is the integration
of an automated file format identification tool, PRONOM-DROID,
developed by The National Archives (TNA) in the UK (Brown 2005). The
service provider
model again fits well with an OAI
application, which as we have seen is core to IR software, as OAI is
predicated on the data provider-service provider relationship (Lynch
2001). The archival storage, or service provider, element in principle
covers the full range of preservation services, from bit-level storage
to migration and emulation. At this stage this can be viewed as a
'black box' approach from the IR perspective because the preservation
activities are assumed to be performed entirely by the service provider
based on an agreed plan. We will soon begin to see this aspect of the
model change, however, towards a more interactive relationship between
preservation service and IR.
Figure
3. Schematic of Preserv service provider model, showing IR functions,
format ID tool and OAI interface to preservation service provider
As in Knight (2005), the Preserv model as presented easily lends itself
to
analogy
with the ubiquitous OAIS representation. In terms of the main OAIS
functionality -- ingest, data management, storage,
dissemination, etc. -- these models highlight how responsibilities
might be shared between partners. For example, in the service provider
model the IR could be OAIS-compliant, but it need not
necessarily be if
the service provider delivers that compliance. At the other extreme, in
the software model
where there is no other partner, the IR clearly has to be OAIS-aware to
provide a minimal level of compliance.There are
essentially three variations:
- the whole illustrated model forms an OAIS unit (as in Figure 2b)
- both partners -- IR and service provider -- are OAIS-compliant
- the service provider is OAIS-compliant
In IR terms the the formalisation of the deposit interface to
embrace
the requirements of OAIS ingest has particular significance: "until it
becomes common practice to integrate
digital stewardship and preservation concerns into the entire digital
content lifecycle -- especially front-end content creation --
most digital preservation workflows intended to be inclusive will be
reactive instead of prescriptive." (Anderson et al. 2005). IRs are some way from
being able to impose on authors content creation rules to support
preservation.
In Preserv one service
provider partner is the British Library (BL), which of course will
offer an
OAIS service. Thus the second of the three variations is most likely to
be the case. Figure 4 shows two simplified, co-joined OAIS models
representing the IR and the service provider. The OAIS administrative
functions are shown shared between the two partners pending further
investigation into this model to determine practical allocations.
Figure
4. Two OAIS repositories in Preserv preservation service provider
scenario
Figure 4 also explodes the service provider into a range of optional
services, which were informed by the BL. While the first two - byte
storage and transformation - focus on data ingest, the
latter two services - rendering and emulation - are concerned with
dissemination and presentation.
These services further differentiate the cost options. What is striking
is that each of these services is different to the extent it changes
the relationship between the service provider and the repository.
Preservation
need no longer be a monolithic service in this model. By choosing
services based on a
developed institutional profile this potentially changes the relation
from a simple 'you give us the data and we store it' to a more tailored
and interactive partnership. In the next section we see how this more
flexible model can be developed further.
Distributed preservation services: The impact of PRONOM-ROAR
There are sometimes moments in a project's development when
hypothetical models are overturned by practical experience. The trick
is to spot this tipping point and to adapt the model against the
prevailing wisdom of the project. Preserv encountered such a moment,
and was transformed.
We had begun to implement the model of Figure 3, starting with the use
of PRONOM-DROID to profile the formats contained in two partner
repositories at Oxford and Southampton universities. This proceeded
pretty much to
plan. Although not all formats were successfully recognised initially,
we were able to work locally with the repository managers, and feedback
to TNA led to refinements to the PRONOM-DROID format database and ID
tool.
The problem was largely resolved. The issue we now faced was where to
place format ID in the schematic: within the author deposit interface
to the IR, a notoriously sensitive area for IRs, or as a service to the
repository manager.
A secondary issue was scalability to many more repositories. As we have
seen, ROAR provides important quantitative data on the growth of
repositories. Data to ROAR is provided by an OAI harvesting service
called Celestial. Both are developed at Southampton University
independently of Preserv by Tim Brody, a member of the project team.
Brody moved the format ID process from the repository to the OAI
service provider, running DROID against the content harvested by
Celestial, and presenting a rudimentary interface to the results, shown
as links to Preserv profiles, through ROAR. By combining PRONOM-DROID
and ROAR through Web services, the number of repositories with format
profiles leapt from two to over 200. The features of PRONOM-ROAR are
explained in an illustrated guide [11].
Now the thinking about preservation services changes. First the
relation is no longer between PRONOM-DROID and a repository, but with
an
intermediate service. Second, accurate format ID may be a prerequisite
for preservation planning, but alone it is not a solution, so the
question is what to do with this information; how to layer on
additional, value-added preservation services. If format ID can be
provided as a discrete service, presumably it is possible to provide
other services as discrete components via Web services, perhaps from
multiple service providers.
We already have some clues as to the type of discrete preservation
services that might be provided (Figure 4). In addition a structure
that might lend itself to preservation Web services was emerging from
TNA's Seamless Flow programme [12].
TNA initiated this programme in an effort to reengineer workflow in the
creation, management and preservation of electronic records – demanded
by the
impact of increasing volume and the need to widen access (in this case
not in
response to open access but to meet freedom-of-information
requirements). One application of this approach was illustrated by
Brown (2005).
Applying this to Preserv led to the following structured process for
active
preservation aimed at repository content that enables the contributing
service
components to be identified:
- Characterisation: identification (as in PRONOM-ROAR), validation,
and property extraction
- Preservation planning: e.g. risk assessment (of generic risks
associated with particular formats/representation networks), technology
watch (monitoring technology change impacting on risk assessment),
impact assessment (impact of risks on specific IR content),
Preservation plan generation (to mitigate identified impacts, e.g.
migration pathways)
- Preservation action: e.g. migration (including validation of the
results) will provide ongoing preservation intervention to ensure
continued access or provide on demand preservation action, performing
migrations or supplying appropriate rendering tools at the point of
user access.
If we have repositories, growing content, services to access that
content and prospective preservation service providers, the one missing
component is a preservation services testbed, a scalable, realistic and
effective environment to test the tools and services. This might be
provided by the PLANETS
project [13], an EU-wide project in which
both TNA and BL are partners.
Others
have described service-oriented
preservation architectures. PANIC
(Preservation webservices Architecture for Newmedia and Interactive
Collections) proposed a way of describing and discovering preservation
Web services using the Semantic Web (Hunter and Choudhury 2005). This
anticipates multiple services from multiple providers without
specifying what or who, and doesn't take account of possible market
mechanisms, which may become a key factor if services are to be
sustainable. Ferreira et al.
(2006) describe a preservation service
architecture that could in principle use a combination of service
providers and Web service agents, although providing little in the way
of evaluation to show
how effective this approach might be.
Based on experience with PRONOM-ROAR, and adopting ideas leading
towards distributed Web preservation services from Seamless Flow and
other projects, we have updated the service provider schematic from
Figure 3 to show repository services and selectable preservation
services (Figure 5).
![Updated Preserv schematic: distributed services](model-update-rev3.png)
Figure 5. Updated schematic of
Preserv service provider model showing distributed preservation services
Compared with Figure 3, the updated version displays the classified
preservation services identified above, with an additional bitstream,
or storage-based, preservation package. For simplicity these services
are shown with two-way interaction with, in principle, any number of
preservation service providers. The generic machine interface to the IR
is
replaced with an OAI harvester linked to a service with a
human-readable interface. This necessitates that the bi-directional
connecting arrow between the service provider and repository via the
machine interface reverts to an arrow in a single direction from
repository to
harvester. Completion of the feedback loop for the return of metadata
and transformed content to the repository from the services is
represented by a direct connecting arrow between the two. Critically,
PRONOM-DROID has moved from the repository user/author interface to
somewhere between harvester and interface repository services, as in
the case of PRONOM-ROAR.
How will this schematic stand up to practical
examination? There is at least one example of a service in action, if
still experimental. Curtis (2006) describes the Automated Obsolescence
Notification System (AONS), a system to
analyse digital repositories and
determine whether any digital objects contained within them may be in
danger of becoming obsolescent. This is another application that uses
preservation information about
file formats taken from PRONOM. The approach is designed to work
primarily with DSpace repositories, although in general terms the work
is examining the interface between repository software and registries
such as PRONOM. In terms of the services outlined in Figure 5 this
comes closest to technology watch, part of preservation planning.
Conclusion
Distributed preservation
services require further investigation and raise further
questions about the interaction of services providers and client
repositories:
- What coordination is required between services?
- Which are the client-facing services and providers?
- What services can the market sustain?
While there may be some emerging consensus on the range of services
that
may be needed, the primary requirement is for market testing
conditions. The
market for repository
services is not well formed or structured. The number of repositories
is
growing internationally but these are at different stages of
development in
terms of content, institutional backing and funding and, therefore, in
policy. The market for preservation
services among IRs will be determined by repository
policy. A survey of repositories with a Preserv profile discovered
that none had a formal preservation policy (Hitchcock et al. 2007).
Preservation
policy should emerge naturally from general institutional and
repository
policy. Repository directory OpenDOAR discovered that only one-third of
repositories
have any kind of policy (Millington 2006). This suggests that
repositories may be waiting
for
clear guidance on preservation from trusted service providers, and this
allows
scope for the services proposed in this paper. It should not
be
assumed, however, that service providers have an entirely blank canvas
to work
with. The Preserv survey also revealed that, even without a policy,
repositories are making decisions with preservation consequences, for
example,
restrictions on file formats that could be deposited. Service providers
will
need to be aware of the practicalities facing repositories, including
prior
decisions, in scoping services.
The Preserv project has reached the end of its initial period of
funding, and will continue this work in a second phase (Preserv 2)
starting soon, again supported by JISC. The signs
are that preservation
service
providers will emerge to take advantage of Web infrastructure to
deliver tailored and cost-effective services driven by institutional
repositories' increasing
awareness and need for preservation support.
Notes and Links
1 JISC programme Supporting Digital
Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_preservation/programme_404.aspx
2 DSpace http://www.dspace.org/
3 Fedora http://www.fedora.info/
4 EPrints for Digital Repositories http://www.eprints.org/
5 Preserv project http://preserv.eprints.org/
6 Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL) http://www.ncstrl.org/
7 Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) http://repec.org/
8 Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) http://roar.eprints.org/
9 MetaArchive project http://www.metaarchive.org/
10 KB and SURF realise durable access to Dutch academic output through
the DARE-depot, Koninklijke Bibliotheek
news release, 28 November 2006 http://www.kb.nl/nieuws/2006/dare-en.html
11 Preserv Format Profiling: PRONOM-ROAR: An illustrated guide http://trac.eprints.org/projects/iar/wiki/Profile
12 Seamless flow, The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/electronicrecords/seamless_flow/default.htm
13 PLANETS project http://www.planets-project.eu/
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