JISC

Start date: 1 October 2004

End date: 1 September 2006

JISC theme(s): Information environment, e-Administration

Committees: JISC Integrated Information Environment committee

Working Groups: Repositories & Preservation Advisory Group

This programme has now been concluded and a synthesis report has been written by Maureen Pennock (UKOLN & Digital Curation Centre) to summarise and clarify the lessons learnt from these projects. An evaluation-type report was written for JISC to use internally and a public summary of the programme was also produced. This section of the report is available here.

Preservation of digital resources is of increasing importance for a wide range of activities within the UK HE/FE and research community. Much of the institutional knowledge base and intellectual assets are now in digital form. There is however a growing realisation that this investment is threatened as the enduring accessibility of the digital resources into the future is far from assured. Due to their dependence on a rapidly changing technological infrastructure, digital resources are significantly less permanent than their paper-based equivalents. Preservation is therefore a more immediate issue for digital resources.

There is an identified need to provide institutions with practical support in effective digital preservation and asset management, to ensure the ongoing availability and future accessibility of the digital information that is of value to the community. Supporting institutions in long-term digital asset management and preservation forms a central theme of JISC’s continuing access and digital preservation strategy. Work related to this programme includes the Digital Preservation and Records Management programme and Supporting Records Management in Institutions programme.

Aims and objectives

Project outputs from the Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions programme will provide a lasting benefit to the wider community of all UK universities and colleges. JISC will manage the programme to encourage collaboration between individual projects and related initiatives such as the new Digital Curation Centre. The following themes are addressed within these projects:

1. Institutional management support
2. Digital preservation assessment tools
3. Institutional repository infrastructure development

Institutional Management Support and Collaboration

Exemplar strategies for developing long-term digital preservation strategies as a part of the institution’s corporate/information strategy will be addressed by these projects, as well as practical implementations of these strategies. Training programmes for staff development, aimed at developing the appropriate level of knowledge and skills necessary for digital preservation and asset management at institutions will be established.

Digital Preservation Assessment Tools

Not all digital assets that an institution possesses need to be preserved, therefore decisions need to be made about selection and preservation throughout the lifecycle of digital information. The project will make available tools to inform an digital institution's preservation policy.

Institutional Repository Infrastructure Development

There are few UK implementations of the OAIS Reference Model. Funded projects will explore implementations of the OAIS as well as the METS metadata standard in the context of the OAIS Information Model. Most currently available open source repository software applications do not have long term digital preservation as a key goal of their design. In order to facilitate the incorporation of preservation planning and management into repository development, some projects are exploring integrating a preservation functionality in current open source repository software.

Proposals for projects in this programme were invited through  JISC Circular 4/04.