How much is your institutional repository doing
to preserve its contents? According to a recent
report from the European DRIVER project:
Nearly 73% of the digital repositories do have
the long-term availability of their materials secured [1]
This surprisingly high number is encouraging, but
it's not quite as simple as answering a single
question. Find out how ready your repository is
to engage with preservation by trying this
preservation metadata worksheet, with
accompanying introductory slides, prepared for a
recent professional briefing event held by the
JISC Repositories Support Project at the British Library
http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/ProfBrief.php#past08
Focussed on a practical exercise described in the
worksheet, the workshop aimed to demystify
preservation for managers of institutional
repositories by linking 20 selected items from
the authoritative PREMIS preservation metadata
dictionary to activities that repositories
perform today. You will perhaps find, as
participants at the RSP event did, that you are
already collecting much of this information,
without thinking of it as preservation.
Preservation is not just about the long term, but
is built on good general repository management and practice today.
[1] The European Repository Landscape Inventory
Study into the Present Type and Level of
OAI-Compliant Digital Repository Activities in
the EU, Maurits van der Graaf, Kwame van Eijndhoven
http://dare.uva.nl/aup/nl/record/260225
This study is based on a Web survey and
questionnaire. From the section on long-term availability (pp 41-42):
Is the long-term availability of the materials in
the repositories secured? A question about this
was answered as follows (see also figure 9):
Nearly 73% of the digital repositories do have
the long-term availability of their materials secured.
Nearly 16% of the digital repositories do not
have the long-term availability of their materials secured.
About 11% of the respondents answered this question with ‘don't know’.
Steve Hitchcock
Preserv Project Manager
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
http://preserv.eprints.org/
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