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KeepIt repositories initial survey: UAL Kultur

This is the final entry in our mini-series of four exemplar repository profiles, and it covers the soon-to-be-launched Kultur arts repository at the University of the Arts, London.

To recap again for new readers, the purpose of these initial surveys of the exemplar repositories in the KeepIt project is to characterise the repositories not in terms of their digital preservation activity but in terms of factors that will influence possible preservation strategies.

Given the nascent status of the repository, this profile is not as fully formed as the others in the series, and we will return to complete it as and when we have access to evaluate the repository.

For some background on how the Kultur repository fits into this institution, see Andrew Gray’s report on Environmental assessment of UAL for the Kultur project (8 April 2008).

Current status of repository

Due to be embedded institutional service at UAL, launch summer 2009, pre- next academic year.

Was part of the JISC Kultur repository enhancement project to end March 2009, joint with University for the Creative Arts, and with Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

UAL Kultur is also participating in a new 12 month JISC Open Educational Resources project in art, design and media joint with University for the Creative Arts, University of Cumbria and led by the Art Design Media Higher Education Academy subject centre at University of Brighton. This project is expected to contribute teaching and learning content to the UAL repository.

Mission

Open access repository for research, and teaching and learning materials.

Drivers are: research assessment needs (REF), requires digital submission; also Arts and Humanities Research Council open access mandate.

Management structure and decision-making, reporting tree

Library director -> Learning resources manager -> Repository manager and assistant.

IR advisory group.

Staffing (no. FTE)

Repository manager and assistant to be appointed pre-launch.

Policy (documentation, e.g. mandate, format policy, retention policy, take down policy?)

IPR is a ‘big part’ of KULTUR, e.g. performance.

Policy has been constructed using OpenDOAR policies tool.

Takedown policy ready to be published.

Planning the repository (formal planning approach?)

Budget (contingency for preservation?)

Infrastructure (institutional, network, etc.)

Internal, embedded

Discussion with IT on service specification, data size limits per item/per researcher

Upgrading servers

Backup provided

Tools, services and support (which v. EPrints?)

KULTUR-customised version of EPrints, includes image, video, audio players.

Storage (current, strategy?)

2TB local storage

Content profile – volume, types, formats (content control?)

No profile available pre-launch.

Informally content is described as 300 records from 100 researchers, with an average of 5 items (digital objects) attached to each record, including images, video, audio and text (pdf).

Mostly mediated deposit.

Growth projections (scaling up?)

Still ‘lots’ of content to be ingested via mediated pipeline.

Future plans for the repository (any major changes planned?)

Requested to store a 50k-item collection.

Digitization of past RAE records likely to increase content to be managed by repository.

Summary

  • UAL institutional Kultur repository still to launch
  • Content volumes growing via internal mediation channel; profile unclear
  • Audio-visual, multimedia content introduces complexity in IPR

Proposed actions

  • Review this profile once the new repository can be accessed (more unknowns than with other exemplar repositories)
  • Generate content profiles when access is possible
  • Investigate effect of multimedia content on IPR, data management and significant properties (what is being preserved: individual digital objects, or the combination, i.e. performance, of those objects?)
  • Consult on upgrade to EPrints v3.2 when available; need to assess effect of customisations on EPrints upgrades

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By Steve Hitchcock – June 11, 2009

Cloud storage risk profiles

Clouds, lake Ontario and east of downtown Toronto, by Reza Vaziri

One view of digital preservation is it is the management of risk. A component of preservation is storage, and there are an increasing range of storage options. This is why EPrints repository software, following work in the Preserv 2 and KeepIt projects, has developed a repository storage controller and a series of plugins to enable this controller to work with emerging storage services.

One new option is ‘cloud’ storage, which for the user removes the problems of building technology and infrastructure and reduces the issue to economics (cost of space x usage). EPrints has a plugin for the new Sun Cloud Storage Service as well as for Amazon S3.

But cloud services do not remove risk, they just alter the risk profile. Which cloud service do you trust?

Questions would have to be raised about each cloud service provider. One way of identifying the issues and questions, and a good way to prompt thinking about preservation, is to profile the services, just as we have been doing for our repository exemplars in KeepIt. Helpfully ZDNet has profiled the ‘big five’ (‘plus one to watch’, but not yet including Sun) cloud service providers, and it’s not just about storage.

No doubt we will discover more questions to ask, and it certainly doesn’t provide all the answers (What back-end cloud infrastructure does (the provider) have in place? “Amazon declined to provide any details”. “Google declined to provide details on the number of its datacentres or their locations”), but it is a start and is pitched at a good level for inquisitive repository managers.

Update (12 June 2009)

Lightning takes down Amazon cloud; Just an example. Judge the risks for yourself. “While most instances were unaffected, a set of racks does not currently have power, so the instances on those racks are down. The disruption lasted around four hours. 
 A series of outages have hit other online or cloud computing services over recent months 
 Google services were hit by an outage which apparently affected one in 10 of its users. 
 Salesforce.com experienced an outage that disrupted all its customers for approximately an hour.”

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By Steve Hitchcock – June 10, 2009

KeepIt repositories initial survey: eCrystals

eCrystals logo

Our third repository exemplar is eCrystals, which manages scientific, specifically crystallography, data that might be referred to broadly as e-data or e-science.

To recap the purpose of these initial surveys of the four exemplar repositories in the KeepIt project, we are seeking to characterise the repositories not in terms of their preservation activity but in terms of factors that will influence possible preservation strategies.

Since this repository operates somewhat differently from the others, some brief background information is needed. The repository is operated by the National Crystallography Service (NCS) based at the University of Southampton, so is a national service. It manages two types of data: the ‘raw’ data generated directly by crystal analysis, and the results data â€˜derived’ from the raw data.

NCS offers two types of experimental service to its users

  1. Full determination, where NCS generates raw data and works up derived data into results. This is deposited in eCrystals (generally initially embargoed);
  2. Data Collection only, where NCS collects the raw data and turns it into the first stage of derived data. This derived data is then sent to users and they work it up into results. None of the user-derived or results data is deposited in eCrystals.

The future plan is to use eCrystals for 2, where NCS deposits first-stage derived data, the user picks it up, turns it into a result and deposits the result into eCrystals.

http://ecrystals.chem.soton.ac.uk/

ROAR: http://roar.eprints.org/index.php?url=http://ecrystals.chem.soton.ac.uk/

Current status of repository

Was funded by JISC, eCrystals open-access archive project, to end March 2009.

Archive service provided as part of NCS at Southampton University, funded by EPSRC. This funding is subject to periodic review in the forthcoming research cycle.

Mission

eCrystals Southampton is the archive for Crystal Structures generated by the Southampton Chemical Crystallography Group and the EPSRC UK National Crystallography Service (NCS).

Management structure and decision-making, reporting tree

Management structure of the repository is headed by the director of the national service.

Staffing (no. FTE)

0.5 FTE systems administrator

Policy (documentation, e.g. mandate, format policy, retention policy, take down policy?)

Embedded into NCS Publication Policy: â€œWe have created an archival method for crystal structure data which is designed to reside on Institutional Repositories.

“At the present time, we are operating two archives. One is a private resource, visible only within the Southampton firewall, which is used as a comprehensive laboratory management and data archival system, to which we now routinely upload all completed and validated crystal structure determination outputs. The other archive is an open access resource, visible externally, which we are now using as a direct route to dissemination of structural data. Each entry is assigned a Digital Object Indentifier (DOI) so that the entry may be referenced in any future publication.”

For journal publications that report and link to crystal structure determinations presented in the repository the policy recognises it is important to satisfy publishers and the public that it will have the same stability and longevity as journal publications.

The “two” archives referred to here are concerned with just the derived and results data, not raw data. The difference today is effectively embargoed and not embargoed. The “raw” data is stored at the Atlas Data Store at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, essentially a closed repository that is used as an internal store, but this data is available on request (by email / post / dropbox type solutions).

Planning the repository (formal planning approach?)

Repository founded on JISC project planning and design

Data architecture carefully matched to crystallography requirements

Investigated preservation needs and options: A study of Curation and Preservation Issues in the eCrystals Data Repository and Proposed Federation

Further preservation reports due:

  1. Representation Information for Crystallography Data;
  2. Preservation Planning for Crystallography Data;
  3. Preservation Metadata for Crystallography Data

Budget (contingency for preservation?)

Budget covers storage of raw data.

Results (derived) data not formally budgetted but this is to be reviewed.

Infrastructure (institutional, network, etc.)

eCrystals server managed by sys. admin.

Archive is backed up nightly. No offsite backups of server. The backup is within the chemistry department, to a building connected by corridor.

Personal curation culture – analysis of crystal structures performed on series of linux boxes

Tools, services and support (which v. EPrints?) 

version: eprints-3.0.3-rc-1

Reconfigured repository software, core code modified,  bespoke standalone code and third-party Web services used.

Storage (current, strategy?)

Record of the raw data back to about 2002, including frame images, at the Atlas Data Store at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Testing storage of raw data (500 GB) from just the last couple of years on (School of ECS, Southampton) Honeycomb server (Honeycomb hardware platform discontinued by Sun, support continues to 2013).

Data from 1998-2002 is on USB disks stored in our lab, migrated from CDs written at the time of generation.

Institutional solution preferred.

Content profile – volume, types, formats (content control?)

The information contained within each entry of this archive is all the fundamental and derived data resulting from a single crystal X-ray structure determination, but excluding the raw images.

21/05/09
archive: 480, buffer: 26, inbox: 65, deletion: 7, eprint: 578
document: 565

Preserv format profile (large number of files ‘unknown’ to profiling tool)

Growth projections (scaling up?)

Plan to expand remit of repository to cover user-derived data (see above).

Scientific instrumentation has a typical lifespan of 10 years. As equipment is renewed there is likely to be an order of magnitude increase in data volumes.

Future plans for the repository (any major changes planned?)

Change storage model – cloud?

Target more learned society involvement.

Summary

  • Part of national service provision
  • Detailed repository data architecture design developed over several project iterations
  • Highly customised (EPrints) repository software
  • Well informed and proactive on preservation
  • Funding uncertainties pending review

Proposed actions

  • Review storage provision
  • Examine infrastructure options and prospects, strengthen current arrangements
  • Assess scope for policy provision beyond publishing policy
  • Consider how to cultivate and embed personal curation practices endemic in this field of science
  • Produce more complete profile of deposit formats
  • Consult on upgrade to EPrints v3.2 when available, or assess how to integrate preservation-support tools from this version in the customised repository software

Thanks to Simon Coles, Manjula Patel and Richard Stephenson for sharing and clarifying this information.

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By Steve Hitchcock – June 2, 2009

KeepIt repositories initial survey: NECTAR

After looking first at the EdShare repository, the second of our exemplar surveys looks at NECTAR, the institutional repository for the University of Northampton.

Our approach to repository preservation is founded on recognising the motivations, objectives and activities of the individual repository, rather than the other way around. So in the initial surveys of the four exemplar repositories in the KeepIt project, we are seeking to characterise the repositories not in terms of their preservation activity but in terms of factors that will influence possible preservation strategies.

http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/

ROAR http://roar.eprints.org/index.php?url=http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/

Current status of repository

JISC start-up repository project to end March 2009, now embedded institutional service.

Mission

The University of Northampton’s open access institutional repository. Its purpose is to showcase university research to the world. NECTAR will make full content available whenever possible (from official statement)

Internally the repository has been supported by senior institutional management to serve primarily as an institutional record of all research outputs (describing research activity) for research reporting and assessment purposes. This stops short of a requirement for the records to be accompanied by full-text.

Management structure and decision-making, reporting tree

Repository manager (reports to) Deputy Director, Information Services (reports to) Director, Information Services.
NECTAR steering group will meet annually (or more frequently as necessary).

Staffing (no. FTE)

Ongoing support for NECTAR from eleven permanent staff:

  • six NECTAR administrators (one from each School – to collate and enter research outputs) (6 x 0.05 FTE)
  • five others from Information Services (INS):
    • two metadata experts (to check and enhance metadata) (2 x0.1 FTE)
    • one technical person – (to support EPrints) (0.1FTE)
    • one administrator (to gather full content, undertake IPRchecking, etc.) (0.1 FTE)
    • one repository manager (0.3 FTE)
  • Total = 1.0 FTE approx.

Academic librarians promote NECTAR as part of their general liaison activities.

Policy (documentation, e.g. mandate, format policy, retention policy, take down policy?)

Planning the repository (formal planning approach?)

NECTAR is the responsibility of INS and will be planned and managed by the management team in 2, above.

Budget (contingency for preservation?)

Not yet fixed. Current funding on a ‘value for money basis’. Software cost incurred through contract with EPrints Services.

Infrastructure (institutional, network, etc.)

Hosted on a dedicated INS server, with a test server also available for backup and test of new code changes.
Main server is backed up as part of regular INS security procedures.
Repository software support under contract with EPrints Services.

Tools, services and support (which v. EPrints?) 

version: eprints-3.0.5 (soon to upgrade to 3.1)

Storage (current, strategy?)

No immediate requirement to expand storage beyond infrastructure provision.

Content profile – volume, types, formats (content control?) 

18/05/09

archive: 1458, buffer: 265, inbox: 96, deletion: 4, eprint: 1824
document: 57 (objects attached to eprint records)

Mediated deposit only.
No versioning issues: only one version permitted, following publication

Growth projections (scaling up?)

Expect approx 500 new metadata records p.a. but could rise (allow for 1000 records p.a.)
Possible growth in metadata records from School of Arts.

Future plans for the repository (any major changes planned?)

Add social Web features – build NECTAR into an online ‘social’ space for researchers; incorporating file sharing and storage, limited version control and semi-automatic update of NECTAR.

Summary

  • Well managed repository, achieving institutional records-keeping objective
  • Strong technical support, locally and through software services
  • Well developed policy statement; bold on preservation
  • Limited full-text content (most or all in pdf format); growth of data volumes not expected to change significantly, at least in short-term
  • Unclear budget allocations

Proposed actions

  • Advice/training:
    • policy: assess feasibility of commitments made
    • costing for preservation
    • monitor updates to risk profiles for pdf versions
  • Upgrade to (preservation-supported) EPrints v3.2 when available (by discussion and agreement of Project Management and EPrints Services)

These are relatively light NECTAR-specific actions at this stage resulting, it should be noted, not just from the limited availability of full-text content but also from good management. Not to forget this is an initial survey, and more issues are likely become apparent as we progress.

Thanks to Miggie Pickton for help in compiling this profile.

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By Steve Hitchcock – May 20, 2009

Microsoft open formats still unconvincing

It is likely that most authors of repository content, like most of the general population of the planet, use Microsoft Office tools. This may not be immediately apparent, but Office is likely to be the source of most pdfs found in repositories. For presentation and preservation, apparently, repositories prefer pdf to ‘closed’ MS formats.

With the highly-contested but eventual ratification of Open Office XML (OOXML) as an ISO open standard format, it seems likely this perception will change, but progress has not been smooth.

Broadly, for archival purposes open standards are good. The recent news story, on plans by MS and a German research institute to build an online tool to validate documents against internationally recognised document-format standards that are intended to provide a format that can be supported by productivity software from any vendor, seems to mark further progress. This in turn followed the introduction of a series of tools intended to improve interoperability between Office Open XML (OOXML) and other XML-based document formats such as the OpenDocument Format (ODF), and various related developments.

So it was curious then that a spokesperson for the competing ODF should say that: “The feeling had been that OOXML was dead in the water”. How can this be reconciled with ongoing MS developments? A possible source for this claim is this news blog. The MS pledges referred to have since largely been fulfilled yet the problems may go deeper:

“For the majority of customers, who don’t particularly care about the new format, the switch to OOXML means jumping through hoops either to reconfigure its Office 2007 installations to default to Microsoft’s binary Office formats, or to install add-on software to OOXML-enable previous Office versions.

“For the customers who do care about open formats, OOXML does not–and probably cannot–fit the bill. The version of OOXML that ships with Office 2007 is not even the same version of the format that’s managed (through much controversy) to earn ISO’s stamp of approval. Indeed, the differences between the on-paper OOXML and the one that lives in Office are great enough that Microsoft has stated that Office won’t support the standardized version of OOXML until the next iteration of Office ships”

As a result the route to adoption of MS open formats has been murkier and the pace slower than might have been envisaged.

It will be interesting to see if OOXML objects start to appear in repositories in significant numbers, if repository deposit policies adapt to allow such formats. If so, we might see risk analysis profiles of the format, factoring in some of the issues raised in news and comment, something like the preliminary profiles of other formats produced by KeepIt project developer Dave Tarrant. Recent efforts by MS are likely to improve the result of any such profile, but will this be enough?

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By Steve Hitchcock – May 19, 2009

KeepIt repositories initial survey: EdShare

EdShare repository logo

Debra pre-empted the results of this survey for EdShare appearing here, since she saw the draft and not unreasonably anticipated that I would post the final version here somewhat sooner. I am pleased to complete the record.

http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/

Entry in Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) http://roar.eprints.org/index.php?url=http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/

Current status of repository

“Service in development”
Launched via JISC EdSpace project, to end March 2009. Ongoing institutional commitment a minimum of 12 months from end of project.

As well as KeepIt, EdShare is contributing to the following projects:

Mission

Educational core services anchored in learning and teaching processes.

Management structure and decision-making, reporting tree

Project director, management committee of senior university/learning and teaching staff
Project director has final decision

Staffing

Repository manager, core technical support team

Policy (documentation, retention policy, takedown policy?)

Terms and conditions (pdf)
Takedown policy (pdf): “a service to sustain on-line resources”

Planning (formal planning approach?)

In development, as EdShare migrates to an element of the core business of the iSolutions group within the University.

Budget (contingency for preservation?)

‘Flexible’. Current funding routes include JISC, institutional and local sources

Infrastructure (institutional, network, etc.)

Institutional (departmental) systems support, backups, software patches

Tools, services and support (which v. EPrints?)

version: eprints-3.1.0

Internal EPrints support

Storage (current, strategy?)

Local server storage (400Gb available, 91 GB used)

Content profile – volume, types, formats, projections (content control?) 

12/05/09
archive: 1310, inbox: 538, deletion: 0, eprint: 1848
document: 6972 (objects attached to eprints records)

Deposit only by members of the University of Southampton.

Future plans for the repository (any major changes planned?)

Carry on with EdShare.

Provide secure, long term storage for the learning and teaching resources of the institution currently located in Blackboard.  Enable easy linking or embedding of these resources from EdShare to the VLE.

More EdShare-like services in other institutions: “to enable this service to be tested as a prototype for possible similar services elsewhere”

Growth projections (scaling up?)

Take in content from a Blackboard service (10k’s of objects)

Summary

  • Significant size for a year-old project repository
  • Likely to show a degree of content and format diversification in profile
  • Clear management and direction
  • Limited policy
  • Unclear budget allocation and forward planning
  • Step-change in content volume possible
  • Not strongly founded for preservation decisions

Proposed actions

  • Create file format and risk assessment profile
  • Investigate storage options (required if Blackboard content to be ingested)
  • Advice/training:
    • policy development and its role in preservation
    • costing for preservation
    • significant properties
  • Upgrade to (preservation-supported) EPrints v3.2 when available  (by discussion and agreement of iSolutions, Project Management and technical support teams)

Thanks to Debra Morris for assistance in preparing this profile.

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By Steve Hitchcock – May 19, 2009

Another perspective on the conversation

So, Steve suggested that for the diary, there might be different perspectives on a Project event.  Steve and I had a meeting as a preparation for participation in the KeepIt Project.  Steve has blogged from his perspective on our conversation and this is my take on some aspects of our discussion:

I am manager of the EdShare learning and teaching repository in the University of Southampton: www.edshare.soton.ac.uk

We have developed Edshare over the last 18 months as a JISC-funded institutional exemplar project. The focus of the project has been split between 50% technical and 50% cultural change. Working with my colleague, Jessie Hey, as academic advocates to engage colleagues involved in learning and teaching across the University, to engage with the idea of a learning and teaching repository, to commit to adding content to EdShare and then to develop our understanding of how it is meaningful for teachers to work with their resources in this way, to share their materials with other teachers and to respond to other folk who happen to find their materials as a consequence of undertaking searches on the open web.

When I was in discussion with Steve, I reflected on the extent to which preservation issues have or haven’t figured in the work of our Project. Certainly, we have always been concerned to build good rapport with teachers and academics and have engaged people with issues such as: a safe place to deposit material you really care about; developing the confidence of depositors that we will respect and present their materials appropriately; extending our professional role as librarians to build on the trust that we rely on in our academic communities. I wouldn’t, though, consider using the “preservation” word. Indeed, Steve mentioned rather “long term management” of the resources and materials that we are interested in, and this felt much more comfortable as a term to me.

Another aspect that we touched on in our discussion was that of “significant properties” in resources within the scope of EdShare. We are experiencing (and anticipate a likely increase) a significant diversity of formats in materials deposited in EdShare. Given this situation, we also anticipate that there are likely to be a wider range of challenges from the long term management perspective. From the author’s point of view, however, the concept of “significant properties” may override consideration of more “secure” or more easily managed formats. Thus, a Camtasia file has come to the notice of one of our technical team. This format type has been “red flagged” in terms of preservation risk. What Camtasia does essentially is screen recorder software which bundles audio, video and other files together and presents a very neat, easy to use index menu presented as well. Indeed this last aspect has been higlighted to me personally by a University colleague as the “significant property” of this software over other competitor products. So, explaining to an academic or learning technologist that their preferred choice of an attractive, easy-to-use and very well-designed software product is a problem from the perspective of “preservation” may not necessarily win them over to our concerns in this field. How should we approach these challenges?

Debra Morris

EdShare, University of Southampton

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By d.morris – May 15, 2009

Anger management

Pierrot longing for the moon

Pierrot longing for the moon (copyright Kenneth Anger)

On tuesday I went along to a showing of the Kenneth Anger
 film Rabbit’s Moon. After the showing there was a discussion with Dr. Anger about his movies and life. Part of the reason for the showing was the release of the Magick Lantern Cycle by the BFI of his movies on Blu-Ray. This is good news for fans since most of his movies have languished on vhs for years and early DVDs have long been out of print, however if you wanted to see them the net offered plenty of opportunities. This particular film was made on an extremely flammable negative film stock and had originally been filmed in the 1950s but rediscovered by Cinematheque in the 1970s. Kenneth was amazed at its survival and enthused about blu-ray since it will keep his films in circulation. He pointed out the amazing statistic that 90% of silent movies have not survived which reveals how poor our knowledge of early movies is. Will this be the same with ‘art’ films currently made on new technology? How will we even begin to manage HD films? I have noticed that a lot of art researchers are now using this medium and even uploading such films to repositories is daunting in terms of size and time taken. While Pierrot fails in attaining the moon you know he will continue to try.

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By a.gray – May 14, 2009

Exemplar repositories: positioned for preservation?

How well positioned and adaptable are our exemplar repositories for digital preservation practices? In the next couple of weeks I’ll be visiting each of them to find out. It’s important that we identify the requirements of the repository and build on what is there, rather than trying to transform them for another purpose. Preservation has to be integral but consistent with the core objectives.

To structure this intial investigation the following issues will begin to answer the opening question:

  • Current status of repository
  • Management structure and decision-making, reporting tree
  • Staffing (no. FTE)
  • Policy (documentation, e.g. mandate, format policy, retention policy, take down policy?)
  • Planning the repository (formal planning approach?)
  • Budget (contingency for preservation?)
  • Infrastructure (institutional, network, etc.)
  • Tools, services and support (which v. EPrints?)
  • Storage (current, strategy?)
  • Content profile – volume, types, formats (content control?)
  • Growth projections (scaling up?)
  • Future plans for the repository (any major changes planned?)
We’ll report the findings for each repository in a series of subsequent blogs. This is our starting point. There are no instant solutions for preservation, and over the period of the project we will take the repositories through a series of stages to develop preservation strategies that work for them. Each is likely to be different, and the results of this analysis will tell us on which stages we need to focus our efforts.

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By Steve Hitchcock – May 13, 2009

KeepIt project and this blog: the start

Repositories are entrusted by their institutions to manage their digital outputs, so data management is clearly a core activity, but extending that to longer term requirements – ‘digital preservation’ – has not happened yet on a wide scale.

Who will be responsible for preserving this content: repositories and their institutions, or preservation service providers? In many cases the answer is: both. There is no services-only solution.

There are various preservation tools and services but little awareness or uptake by repositories, perhaps because these are too complex and potentially costly. These activities have typically been presented to repositories as additional tasks rather than as integral to their current activities. The tools and the documentation have not usually been designed for these repositories.

The JISC KeepIt project is about closing that gap between repositories and emerging preservation tools and services. It will do this by enhancing a series of distinctive exemplar repositories, and will involve the managers of each liaising with specialists on the development of preservation strategy, policy and services for repositories.

These repositories will aim to become leading exemplars of preservation-aware repositories, but more will be done. The repository managers, based on this practical experience of specifying their preservation needs and overseeing the implementation, will become evangelists within their peer community of repository managers. Those best able to help repositories understand and achieve their preservation requirements will be other repository managers.

This blog will be one of the forums used to inform repository peers by creating a contemporaneous record of the processes, thoughts and ideas behind the project’s efforts to train, assist and support four exemplar digital repositories to become preservation-aware

The types of outputs being produced across institutions that might be managed in an institutional repository (IR) include research papers, theses, science data, arts, and teaching materials. Each presents a different challenge to digital preservation practices if these materials are to be effectively managed for longer-term access and use. An ideal exemplar of preservation practices would have within its scope this range of materials. There are few, if any, IRs yet that offer a critical mass of content in all of these areas, but by working with a number of repositories, including institutional, subject-based and focused repositories, we have assembled a multi-institutional IR exemplar that is fully representative all of these types of output, and will provide a fascinating basis on which to develop preservation planning and implementation strategies.

The repositories that will be reporting progress towards are

  • Kultur (University of the Arts London)
  • EdShare
  • eCrystals
  • NECTAR (Northampton University’s institutional repository)

All use EPrints repository software, and are based at the University of Southampton (UoS), home of EPrints, have been incubated in joint past projects with UoS, or are supported by services based at UoS.

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By Steve Hitchcock – May 12, 2009