All,

> > Firstly, the notion that one 'institutional repository' should hold
all
> of
> > a university's e-objects is an absurd one, and generally recognized
by
> my
> > audiences as soon as I say it.The present state of software does not
> > support such a scheme, nor are the characteristics of the objects
> anywhere
> > near uniform. A great deal of time and money is wasted by people who
> > haven't yet realized this simple fact. A university needs several
> > 'e-repositories' or 'e- libraries', whatever you call them.
> 
> This resonated with me. I blogged about this some time ago:
>
http://home.badc.rl.ac.uk/lawrence/blog/2005/03/31/function_creep_and_in
st
> itutional_repositories
> 
> But it's not just about software as that blog tries to say, the
reality is
> that once IRs go outside documents into research data, the concept of
> preservation becomes a lot about having a designated user community
and
> the
> (funded) ability to keep track of their wants and requirements. No
> institutional IR is ever going to be able to migrate all its
e-objects,
> and
> shouldn't pretend that it can.

Although I agree with the accuracy of that last statement I'm not sure
that this is a reason to reject submissions to an IR.

A couple of JISC funded projects (PRESERV and SHERPA DP) are exploring
how central providers (BL, National Archives and AHDS respectively) can
deliver centralized preservation services to IRs. Its early days, but
this model could well provide light at the end of the tunnel for
repositories that do not have the resources to perform the preservation
themselves.

PRONOM is continuing to develop, Global Digital File Format Registry got
Mellon funding last week, DCC is developing Representation Network
technology, and there are other big projects on the way... IRs aren't
going to be out their on their own with no support. 

Quoting selectively from Bryan's blog (apologies in advance!):
>So, yes, I'm very much in favour of institutional repositories, but
they >need to be established with a very clear understanding of what
they will >host and they need to reject material that they can't hope to
preserve. 

Given that the development of preservation technology is at such an
early stage, I'm not sure anyone can answer that question easily. What
we will be able to say with confidence that we can preserve in just a
couple of years time will be far more ambitious than what we can
realistically preserve now. Is this a good reason to turn away material
now?

>Then they need to hold a hard line against function creep, and only
accept >material in "well known formats" (whatever that means) with
"well 

This is a popular strategy to ease the preservation problems the
repositories are taking on. However, the reality is that when faced with
a limited number of submission formats, submitters either don't bother
or they perform migrations themselves. Do we really want to place
complex preservation actions in the hands of the users? No records are
kept of what action they take and migrations are performed in an ad hoc
way. This could well be creating an even bigger preservation challenge
for us in the future.

An interesting compromise is the strategy employed by DSpace. They
present a number of categories of formats and a confidence level in how
well those categories will be preserved. 

>structured metadata" (whatever that means). This is exactly how the
>discipline specific respositories function: we can't take just anything
>because we could never preserve it, and we have a dozen domain experts
to >work on it ... we demand specific formats, and work hard to get
structured >metadata. 

>That's not to say that IRs can't provide a backup service for their
>institutions: somewhere to put other material for temporary storage but
>they ought not to imply that such data has longevity when it doesn't
and >can't.

The key for me is recording and sharing Representation Information.
Specialist expertise is required to describe the data, but once recorded
this can be utilized by many repositories. With the advent of shared
Representation Networks on the horizon we shouldn't be too pessimistic
about what we will be able to preserve in the not too distant future. 

Paul Wheatley
--------
Digital Preservation Manager
eIS Architecture
The British Library
01937 546254
[log in to unmask]

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