Co-operation for digital preservation and curation: collaboration for collection development in institutional repository networks

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Co-operation for digital preservation and
curation collaboration for collection
development in institutional repository networks

• Michael Day, Maureen Pennock and Julie
  AllinsonUKOLN, University of BathBath BA2
  7AYm.day_at_ukoln.ac.uk/http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/

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Presentation outline

• Emerging work from the Digital Curation Centre
• Contexts
• Collaborative infrastructures for digital
  preservation
• Networks of institutional repositories
• Collaboration on preservation infrastructures
• Collaboration on collection development policies
• Potential areas for collaboration
• Conclusions
• What do digital curators do?
• What do they need to know?

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Contexts (1)

• Collaborative infrastructures needed for digital
  preservation and curation, e.g.
• Preservation is "an ongoing, long-term
  commitment, often shared, and cooperatively met,
  by many stakeholders" (Lavoie Dempsey, 2004)
• Examples
• Shared services (e.g. file format registries,
  bit-level preservation)
• Networks of "trust" (audit and certification,
  etc.)
• Collaboration on policy level, e.g. on collection
  development and unified access

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Contexts (2)

• Institutional repositories
• Used by higher education and research
  organisations to provide (open) access to
  peer-reviewed publications and other research
  materials
• Increasingly supported by deposit "mandates" from
  universities or research funding bodies
• Setting up a repository implies an institutional
  commitment to long-term stewardship

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Contexts (3)

• Collaborative infrastructures for institutional
  repositories
• Distributed services linked (for access) by
  metadata harvesting
• OAI-PMH
• Data Providers vs. Service Providers
  (aggregators)
• Potential for the development of shared services
  to support repositories
• Alma Swan Chris Awre, Linking UK Repositories
  (JISC, 2006) http//www.jisc.ac.uk/

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Contexts (4)

• Potential shared services (from Swan Awre)
• Advisory services (e.g. on IPR, preservation)
• Content creation, digitisation
• Repository building or hosting
• Metadata enhancement
• Resource discovery
• Name authorities
• Citation analysis and research assessment
• Preservation

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Digital preservation (1)

• Shared services for preservation
• Not all institutions with repositories will be
  expected to manage long-term preservation
  challenges
• Lack of local expertise and resources
• Existing availability of third party services in
  related areas, e.g. data archives, national
  libraries
• Preservation is a logical area for collaboration

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Digital preservation (2)

• Examples
• DARE (Digital Academic Repositories) initiative -
  The Netherlands
• National Library (KB) has responsibility for all
  content deposited in participating repositories
• Repository Bridge project - UK
• Demonstration of harvesting e-theses (using
  OAI-PHM and METS) by the National Library of Wales

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Digital preservation (3)

• Examples (continued)
• SHERPA DP project - UK
• Developed disaggregated framework for outsourcing
  preservation, based on the OAIS model
• Explored the packaging and transfer of content
  (using METS)

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Digital preservation (4)

• Examples (continued)
• Preserv project - UK
• Led by University of Southampton
• Simple model of modular services, e.g. for
• Bit-level preservation
• Object characterisation and validation (e.g.
  using registries like PRONOM-DROID)
• Preservation Planning (risk assessments,
  technology watch, etc.)
• Preservation strategies (e.g. migration)

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Digital preservation (5)
Preserv service provider model (Hichcock, et
al., 2007)
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Collection development (1)

• Collection development
• Set of activities, including selection,
  acquisition, deselection, disposal, preservation
• A traditional focus of library collaboration,
  e.g. on the development of shared collections
• Need for institutional repositories to consider
  own collection development requirements with
  wider (national or international) contexts

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Collection development (2)

• Managed collaboration on collection development
• Potentially reduces unnecessary duplication of
  effort, but ...
• But may also support redundancy
• Replication of content
• Application of different preservation strategies
• Need to investigate role of repositories with
  regard to more formally published research
  materials
• Perhaps e-journals should be the main focus of
  preservation activities in this domain?

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Collection development (3)

• Institutional repositories need to define
  collection development policies with regard to
• Institutional requirements
• Interoperability requirements (e.g. OAI-PMH)
• Preservation requirements

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Collection development (4)

• Collection development issues
• Content types
• Peer-reviewed research outputs, scientific
  datasets, administrative records, ...
• Will be different preservation priorities
• Object types (file formats)
• Policies will have direct influence on risks (and
  costs) of long-term preservation, e.g.
• Accepting any format
• Only accepting a limited number of format types
  (e.g. PDF/A, XML) need for conversion and
  validation tools, or considerable post-processing

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Collection development (5)

• Potential areas for collaboration (continued)
• Ingest workflows
• Checking conformance with submission rules
• Automated tools for format characterisation and
  validation, maybe conversion (normalisation)
• Metadata enhancement, e.g. consistent forms of
  name
• Ongoing review (and weeding) of collections
• Withdrawal of content (contentious issue)
• Superseded or duplicate material
• Defining preservation service levels
• Different policies needed for different types of
  material

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Conclusions (1)

• What should curators do?
• Collaborate with other stakeholders on
• Strategic level collaboration (e.g. through
  organisations like the UK Digital Preservation
  Coalition)
• Policy development (e.g. through emerging
  national frameworks)
• Research and development
• Standards development (e.g., OAIS, ISO Records
  Management Metadata)
• The development of shared services (e.g. GDFR)

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Conclusions (2)

• What do curators need to know?
• Where core services are dependent on other
  organisations (or services)
• Need to understand the risks
• Need to deal with these sensibly (e.g., through
  contracts, service-level agreements, or by moving
  the most vital functions in-house)
• Many remaining open questions
• Be aware that there are still many unknown
  unknowns
• But it is still important to do something (and to
  collaborate)