Digital Preservation at Academic Institutions
Thursday October 15, 2020
From 2:15pm to 3:00pm
Document
Digital preservation is about access. It’s about ensuring that digital materials are accessible over the long term, and because these materials are significantly more ephemeral than their analog counterparts, effective digital preservation also requires sustained efforts over time, including continued investments in people and technology. To date, academic libraries and archives in Canada have struggled to fulfill their preservation mandate in the digital realm. While we have made significant investments in other key components of digital research infrastructure, such as institutional repositories, research data management tools, and library-based publishing, investments in personnel and technology in support of digital preservation have been inadequate. In this presentation, we will step back and consider why these investments have so far been relatively limited. We will then propose a novel solution to increasing digital preservation capacity across academic institutions in Canada that involves two key components. The first is a major rethink of current workflows for the processing of materials that puts preservation actions first, rather than last; sample workflows will be discussed. The next is the need to move away from locally managed infrastructure--especially for institutional repositories--in order to effectively integrate preservation functionality into the platforms that manage access to digital resources. Without this kind of holistic infrastructure scaling, we will argue that preservation will become increasingly challenging--and resource-intensive--over time. By rethinking workflows and scaling access platforms beyond the institutional level, we hope to increase our ability to make important digital materials accessible not only today, but for generations to come.