How to make preservation into the repository's friend

Steve Hitchcock

Preserv 2 ProjectSchool of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS),

University of Southampton

Group Improv, Repository FringeEdinburgh, 31 July – 1 August 2008

Banks: an interior

Melbourne, Australia

A national bank

Smaller national bank

Smaller national bank

Bigger, taller, better

Can we trust banks with our money?

National library interiors

National library exteriors

Can we trust national heritage libraries with our physical

information artefacts?

Storing digital

Today "the best guess is that Google has more than 450,000 servers spread over at least 25 locations around the world".

How do we project digital preservation?

• Strength, solidity, scale

• Reassurance, competence, confidence

• Trust

Then see

At Libraries, Taking the (Really) Long View

insidehighered.com, July 23, 2008http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/07/23/preservation

"Digital Preservation" term considered harmful?

in the digital domain, we should be selling the outcomes. … terms that reflect the outcomes are more persuasive. So I would argue that outcome-related phrases like "long term accessibility" or "usability over time" are better than the process-oriented phrase "digital preservation".

Chris Rusbridge DCC blog, July 29, 2008 http://digitalcuration.blogspot.com/2008/07/digital-preservation-term-considered.html

Repositories and preservation

• What are repositories for?

• What is the target content?

• Where is the national heritage interest in IRs?

• Is it all respositories for themselves?

• Preservation is the end of the food chain for repositories, and is not yet costed

• But some now mandated, and growing

Requirements from Oxford researchers for services to help with data management

• Advice on practical issues related to managing data across their life cycle.

• Secure and user-friendly solution that allows storage of large volume of data and sharing of these in a controlled fashion way allowing fine grain access control mechanisms.

• Sustainable infrastructure that allows publication and long-term preservation of research data for those disciplines not currently served by domain specific services

• Funding that could help address some of the departmental challenges to manage the research data that are being produced.

From http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/odit/projects/digitalrepository/findings.xml

How do we make preservation the repository's friend?

• Services

• Tools

• Public relations

• Preservation, or storage, data management, ‘continuous access’

• Repository viewpoint

• ?