Start date: 1 March 2007
End date: 31 March 2009
Funding programme: Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme
Project website:
http://www.sherpadp.org.uk/sherpadp2.html
JISC theme(s): Information environment
Committees: JISC Integrated Information Environment committee
Sherpa DP2
The purpose of the project is to develop a full preservation environment capable of serving a range of diverse repositories and content types. It will extend the test-bed collaborative service developed for the SHERPA DP project, to consider a range of different repository archiving models.
As with the initial SHERPA DP project, the collaborative model will develop the relationship between a Content Provider and a Service Provider. The institutional repositories participating in the project will serve as Content Providers, undertaking activities associated with the acceptance and dissemination of digital data. The Arts & Humanities Data Service will serve as a Service Provider, performing activities associated with preservation management, addressing the diverse requirements of digital objects throughout their lifecycle. This will remove the requirement for each repository to employ scarce resources to the development and/or implementation of their own preservation layer.
The expansion of the preservation environment for such diverse range of institutional repositories will require an analysis of their operation, including the type of metadata they create and store, the workflow processes that they use, and other aspects. This will provide a rich set of reports that compare and contrast the operation of each repository. As a result of the investigation, the various aspects of the collaborative model will be reviewed and revised as necessary.
Furthermore, the project will expand upon the basic business model for Service Providers that was developed for SHERPA DP, by establishing an economic cost model that could be used to ensure the long-term sustainability of a distributed preservation service.
In summary the project will:
- Extend the Sherpa DP OAIS based distributed preservation model to accommodate different types of institutional repositories and different collaboration methods, and investigate other options for provision of distributed preservation services.
- Investigate and develop tools to transform repository content (digital objects) as base64 encoded bitstreams for placing inside METS packages. The tool will also create the basic METS package and ensure that the encoded bitstream is appropriately located within the package.
- Investigate and assess other methods for connecting to digital repositories and downloading repository metadata and content.
- Refine the Sherpa DP set of protocols and software in order to interact with institutional repositories using a wider range of repository software applications (all but 1 of the Sherpa DP repositories uses EPrints software) and with a broad range of digital object types.
- Amend, update and expand as appropriate the Digital Preservation User Guide produced by the original Sherpa DP project to take account of the outcomes and lessons of the Sherpa DP2 project.