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- Michael Day, Maureen Pennock and Julie Allinson
UKOLN, University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY
m.day@ukoln.ac.uk/
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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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- 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 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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- 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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- 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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- 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)
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