Preservation for Institutional
Repositories: practical and
invisible
Jessie M.N. Hey1, Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody, Leslie A. Carr
Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, School of Electronics
and Computer Science,
1 also University of Southampton Libraries,
University of Southampton
http://preserv.eprints.org/
Ensuring Long-term Preservation and adding Value to Scientific
and Technical Data (PV2005)
Royal Society of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
21-23 Nov 2005
Institutional Repositories
– the next stage
• Institutional Repositories – early development
but growing fast globally
• Access leading to preservation
• Academic author deposit/mediator – must be
low barrier/low maintenance
• Fundamental is collaboration on services but
what practical choice for our environment?
• First practical steps e.g. EPrints software/The
National Archives/British Library (PRESERV
project)
What is an Institutional Research
Repository?
Southampton Press Release 15 Dec 2004
'We see our Institutional Repository as a key tool for the
stewardship of the University's digital research
assets,' said Professor Paul Curran, Deputy ViceChancellor of the University. 'It will provide greater
access to our research, as well as offering a valuable
mechanism for reporting and recording it.
Our vision includes all research output as part of a
broad institutional repository in a landscape of
interconnecting repositories
A national and international
development of IRs
• The JISC vision reflecting the individual repositories (JISC
Inform no. 8)
In an ideal world of scholarly
communication – all research is freely
available
• June 27th 2005 11th anniversary of Stevan Harnad’s ‘Subversive
Proposal’ leading to the open access vision for scholarly material
• See also Harnad, S. and Hey, J. M. N. (1995) Esoteric Knowledge: the
Scholar and Scholarly Publishing on the Net. In Proceedings of
Networking and the Future of Libraries 2: Managing the Intellectual
Record, Proceedings of an International Conference, Bath, 19-21 April
1995, 110-16. Dempsey, L., Law, D. and Mowlat, I., Eds.
• And journals still become more and more expensive
Even the work of researchers in our own institution is
still often unavailable to us
………… but we’re making progress
Include reports and new journal articles as
yesterday but watch out also for art exhibitions and music and
data: full text/objects or links if possible otherwise metadata only
We heard earlier from
Peter Murray-Rust on 100,000 chemical objects and
CCLRC have a poster about their 5000 technical reports
IRs: UK growth…..
IRs: Global expansion…
University of Southampton
Research Repository: e-Prints
Soton
A topical example to focus the mind:
A fire at the University of Southampton 31st Oct 2005
Photo: Tom Kazmierski and John Lewis
We need smart tools to provide
cost effective ‘preservation of
service’ to move calmly from first
shock to work as normal
Key ingredients: We still have the people and the pub
….and the support of the university community and the external
community ….. for long term preservation
Photos: Adrian Pickering
Mark Furness
Collaborating with The
National Archives
•PRONOM – one of
a future family of
technical registries
PRONOM: the technical
registry - file formats et al
What is PRONOM?
Exploring with University of Southampton
Research Repository/ Oxford Eprints
• More developments forthcoming from
PRONOM
• Opportunity to feed in – varied IR
formats
• Potential: Reports to administrators etc
• Explore with PRESERV test database;
then Southampton and Oxford
repository pilots
e-Prints Soton Pronom
Survey
Format
WinZip Compressed Archive ()
Number of
Records
15
Rich Text Format (1.4)
1
Raw JPEG Stream ()
1
Portable Document Format (1.6)
16
Portable Document Format (1.5)
99
Portable Document Format (1.4)
315
Portable Document Format (1.3)
714
Portable Document Format (1.2)
100
Portable Document Format (1.1)
12
OLE2 Compound Document Format ()
18
Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation (972002)
38
JPEG File Interchange Format (1.01)
1
JPEG File Interchange Format (1.00)
1
Hypertext Markup Language (4.0)
1
Hypertext Markup Language ()
9
And more
Format
Pronom
Matches
Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) Workbook (8)
4
Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) Workbook
(8X)
4
Hypertext Markup Language ()
9
Hypertext Markup Language (4.0)
1
JPEG File Interchange Format (1.00)
1
JPEG File Interchange Format (1.01)
5
Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation (95)
70
Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation (97-2002)
70
Microsoft Word for Windows Document (6.0/95)
26
Microsoft Word for Windows Document (97-2002)
26
OLE2 Compound Document Format ()
24
PKZIP Compressed Archive ()
17
Portable Document Format (1.1)
12
Portable Document Format (1.2)
100
Portable Document Format (1.3)
735
Portable Document Format (1.4)
317
Portable Document Format (1.5)
99
Portable Document Format (1.6)
16
Raw JPEG Stream ()
1
Rich Text Format (1.0)
1
Rich Text Format (1.1)
1
Rich Text Format (1.2)
1
Collaborating with the
British Library for services
• Basic model OAIS but exploring
which model for services
• Our administrators want low cost,
low overhead for a sustainable
archive – utilising expert skills
• Other archives will have similar
needs
• Partnering to share knowledge
PRESERV collaboration
and OAIS
Identifying options:
surveying stakeholders
First our academics –
What is important to you/your group to
preserve:
• Early indications from interviews: they
want the ‘works’
• Their ideal: capture publications in
context
• Therefore web archiving will play a role
• Taking one step at a time
Practical and invisible
• PRONOM and other preservation
activities can often be hidden from view
unless we need our authors to act
• Just as our Institutional Repository
Project TARDis has become invisible as
the IR became an embedded service
Preservation for Institutional
Repositories: practical and invisible
Thank you and for more detail see the
paper and the web site
Jessie Hey, Steve Hitchcock, Tim Brody,
Leslie Carr, University of Southampton
jessie.hey@soton.ac.uk
http://preserv.eprints.org/
http://www.eprints.org/