End date: 1 February 2004
Funding programme: Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme
JISC theme(s): Information environment, e-Administration
JISC has funded a number of projects to support access to and sharing
of institutional content within Higher Education (HE) and Further Education
(FE) and to allow intelligence to be gathered about the technical,
organisational and cultural challenges of these processes. The Focus on Access to
Information Resources (FAIR) programme will contribute to developing
the mechanisms and supporting services to allow the submission and sharing
of content generated by the HE/FE community. This programme is part of a
broader area of development to build an Information Environment for the
UK's Distributed National Electronic Resource.
The programme is inspired by the vision of the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI) that digital resources can be shared between organisations based on a
simple mechanism allowing metadata about those resources to be harvested
into services. In the e-prints community this is realised through data
providers who mount the e-prints (and who could be based in institutions,
in subject groupings, or in some other way), and who disclose their
metadata to a service provider, which again could be based in institutions,
or could be subject based, regional, national or international. End users
can either search the particular data provider of interest, if they know
it, or can search the service provider, which will have gathered together
the metadata from many data providers. The OAI protocol is one mechanism
that can support this model, but there are others. The model can clearly be
extended to include other kinds of objects, for example learning objects,
images, video clips, finding aids, etc. The vision here is of a complex web
of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those
resources, but made available through service providers to the whole
community of learning.
Currently the best known and most heavily used e-print archives have been
established in specific discipline based repositories but individual
institutional repositories are also now being established focussing on
e-prints and other institutional assets. The FAIR programme is one example
of this.
Although referred to as the "Open Archive Initiative" the
‘Archive’ of the OAI refers to the process of depositing articles,
discovery, and promoting access (particularly pre-publication), rather than
to archival custody as such and the process of their preservation in a
long-term repository.
E-prints and institutional repositories are a new and high profile area for
JISC and institutions. The initial focus has inevitably been on encouraging
the deposit of e-prints and developing the OAI schema and tools both in the
UK and internationally. However longer-term requirements will inevitably
having some bearing on these emerging institutional repositories as they
progress beyond the proof of concept and development stage. In order to
analyse and scope future developments to support preservation in
institutional repositories, JISC is now funding this study.
In the first instance there are a number of practical issues to address in
terms of guidance on collection development and policy, which can be built
into institutional collections policies and procedures.
One issue is the criteria for which material should or can be retained and
for how long (in part this could be dependent on other issues such as
eventual publication and IPR policy).
Another will be the data formats accepted or held (if different) by the
repository as these affect longer-term costs and planning. There are a
number of existing repositories and emerging guidelines on formats that
could be relevant to this work. These include existing e-prints and
e-theses repositories or preservation services handling similar file
formats (for example the current preservation review in the Arts and
Humanities Data Service which is providing guidance on a range of data
formats for its services).
OAI metadata provides a metadata set suitable for supporting discovery but
will also need addition of preservation metadata if long-term retention is
to be supported. Preservation metadata has been considered in Cedars,
NEDLIB, and National Library of Australia amongst others and a report
considering and mapping the schema has recently been produced by a Research Libraries Group/OCLC working
group.
In the medium to longer-term a number of possible scenarios could exist for
developing preservation infrastructure for institutional repositories.
Previous digital preservation research funded by JISC has explored models
for distributed preservation of digital materials and the broad thrust of
this work is supported by other preservation research
internationally.
A major part of the JISC Strategy therefore is the establishment of a
Digital Curation Centre to move recommendations from preservation research
from proof of concept to production services and provide appropriate
services and collaboration to support distributed preservation in
institutions and national services. The study will be expected to take
account of the establishment of the Centre and its development path in its
analysis and recommendations for future development of institutional
repositories.
In developing preservation at an institutional level it is likely that the
‘Open Archival Information System’ (OAIS)Reference Model guiding future
developments. This provides a set of high level principles, functions, and
common terminology for digital archives. Although it does not provide an
implementation it is already a starting point for many leading
initiatives. In the medium to long term e-print archive managers may
well want to apply its principles in developing archive policy and
procedures.
Another possible infrastructure scenario is that the long-term preservation
could be supported by transfer/replication in a central national
service(s). This will need careful consideration in the study of
requirements and capacity of institutional repositories themselves,
proposed support services available from the Digital Curation Centre, and
exploration of transfer issues such as IPR and formats, and selection (what
should /could be placed in a central repository and when), and the
acquisition and transfer process from the perspective of central national
services.
In any scenario consideration will need to be given to sustainability as
preservation will require long-term commitments. Proposals will need to be
scaleable over time to accommodate anticipated acquisition and development.
The study will be expected to be informed by cost modelling in
institutional repository projects eg Roquade or D-Space and existing
preservation services eg papers from the Digital Preservation Coalition
October Forum. It is recognised that costs of long-term preservation remain
difficult to quantify but there is a growing body of practical experience
in services which can help isolate principal cost elements over the
"lifecycle" of preservation.