Digital Repository Service Research Articles

Digital Repository as a Service (D-RaaS): Enhancing Access and Preservation of Cultural Heritage Artifacts

The employment of technology and digitization is crucial for cultural organizations to establish and sustain digital repositories for their cultural heritage artifacts. This exploitation is also essential in facilitating the presentation of cultural works and exhibits to a broader audience. Consequently, in this work, we propose a custom-developed digital repository that functions as software-as-a-service (SaaS), primarily promoting the safe storage, display, and sharing of cultural materials; enhancing accessibility; and fostering a deeper understanding and appreciation of cultural heritage. The proposed digital repository service is designed as a multitenant architecture, which enables organizations to expand their reach, enhance accessibility, foster collaboration, and ensure the preservation of their content. Moreover, our technology stack incorporates robust and reliable backend technologies, such as Django, to ensure data security and efficient management. Meanwhile, the frontend is powered by Angular, which guarantees a user-friendly and engaging interface for exploring and interacting with cultural materials. Specifically, this project aims to assist each cultural institution in organizing its digital cultural assets into collections and feeding other digital platforms, including educational, museum, pedagogical, and games, through appropriate interfaces. The creation of this digital repository offers a cutting-edge and effective open-access laboratory solution. It allows organizations to have a significant influence on their audiences by fostering cultural understanding and appreciation. Additionally, it facilitates the connection between different digital repositories and national/European aggregators, promoting collaboration and information sharing. By embracing this innovative solution, cultural institutions can benefit from shared resources and features, such as system updates, backup and recovery services, and data analytics tools, attributes that are currently provided by the platform.

Museum, Library and Archives Partnership: Leveraging Digitized Data from Historical Sources

The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University (MCZ), founded in 1859, has approximately 20 million extant and fossil invertebrate and vertebrate specimens. These historical collections continue to be a focus of research and teaching for the MCZ, Harvard and outside researchers. The Ernst Mayr Library/Archives (EMLA) of the MCZ is a founding member of the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), an international consortium with a mission to make biodiversity literature openly available for use. Meeting the needs of the MCZ is a priority for EML Museum/library and achives collaboration One collaborative Museum/Library project was the digitization of approximately 81,000 MCZ specimen ledger pages/cards associated with various collections. These historical items, once digitized and deposited in the Harvard Digital Repository Service (DRS), were linked to the relevant specimen records in MCZbase, the museum-wide database. Over 1.2 million specimen records are now linked with digitized sources which benefit all users by adding to the provenance of the specimen data and allowing direct referral to the primary collection source. The EMLA holds an extensive collection of field notes, letters and manuscripts of researchers associated with the MCZ. Collector records are a gold mine of unpublished observations, notes, sketches, specimen lists and narratives. They are primary source data at its most personal, and may be the only documentation of a scientist’s thought processes and observations, particularly for unpublished materials. William Brewster was a prominent late 19th, early 20th century naturalist associated with the MCZ Ornithology Department until his death in 1919. Brewster provided authoritative and novel additions to the knowledge of birds, and his detailed, long-term observations are the key to his published contributions. Brewster’s unpublished scientific legacy is being digitized and deposited in the Harvard DRS and BHL by the EMLA. Transcribed notebook pages will be attached to images in BHL thus improving data discovery. Brewster deposited over 45,000 specimens in the MCZ Ornithology Collection. Combining specimens and unpublished notes is an opportunity to link hidden data and enhance research capabilities. Next steps for this collaborative project include finely grained cross-linking of specific pages, correspondence and photographs to and from the MCZ’s specimen database and BHL. We show how MCZ has leveraged data in digital repositories to enhance and directly relate to MCZbase, with citations to notes, transcriptions and published literature. These collaborations enhance discoverability of hidden data while promoting cross-discipline research to interrelated historical sources.

Shutting Down a Consortial Digital Repository Service

ABSTRACTThis column examines the lifecycle of one consortial digital repository service, the Alliance Digital Repository. Though the consortial service provided important infrastructure for members, the nature of digital repository work made it difficult to realize economies of scale. After eight years, members discontinued the shared service and replaced it with single-institution repositories that they could more readily support with the resources available to them. Based on my experiences helping members transition from shared to single-institution repositories, I offer advice for administrators planning or participating in consortial digital repository services.

The Evolving Process to Add Preservation Support for New Formats at Harvard Library

In 2000 Harvard Library began populating the Digital Repository Service (DRS), its digital preservation repository, with digitized text, images and audio. Over the years the Library continued to add preservation support to the DRS for new formats including born digital websites, PDF documents and email. Library collections however continued to grow and diversify to include a wide range of formats not supported by the DRS, including video and a variety of born-digital formats. In 2013 the Library began to bridge that preservation support gap by refining the process of how new formats are supported in the DRS. This paper describes the new process, which is a more consistent workflow and includes external expertise; as well as analysis tools that could be used by other institutions to broaden the range of digital formats that they are able to preserve.

Advancing Digital Repository Services for Faculty Primary Research Assets: An Exploratory Study

The Oviatt Library at California State University Northridge (CSUN) hosts two digital repositories represented by Digital Collections for archival and historical materials, and ScholarWorks institutional repository (IR) for scholarly output. This paper reports on an exploratory study for advancing digital repository services regarding faculty primary research assets created in the course of research and/or collected by scholar custodians of archival materials at CSUN. A survey was distributed to understand: 1) which faculty and departments collect or create primary source assets as part of their research, 2) what types of assets are collected or created, 3) the activities performed to preserve these assets, 4) the level of interest in making primary research documents available online, 5) faculty knowledge of library methods, and 6) attitudes regarding collaboration with the library. This survey functions as part of a needs assessment toward the development of new and enhanced digital repository services to advance research, preservation, data curation, instruction, and exhibition. This knowledge will also help to systematize library and faculty collaboration through the development of policies and workflows that reduce ad hoc re-evaluations and protracted negotiations over the ability of the library to support digital research and instruction projects.

Migrating Repository Metadata and Users: The Harvard DRS2 Project

The Digital Repository Service (DRS), first launched in 2000, is Harvard Library's long-term preservation and access repository. The DRS is central to the Library's discovery, access and management infrastructure; and vital to digitization, reformatting and collection management workflows throughout the university.In 2008 the Library began the DRS2 project - a multi-year repository enhancement project to update to the latest technologies and digital preservation standards and practices; and to provide curators, collection managers and repository staff with significantly enhanced tools. This paper describes early findings of the last stage of the DRS2 project - the migration of the repository metadata for over 46 million files into the newly enhanced DRS, and the facilitated transition of DRS users to learning and adopting the new repository concepts and tools.

Digital Preservation File Format Policies of ARL Member Libraries: An Analysis

Whether overseeing institutional repositories, digital library collections, or digital preservation services, repository managers often establish file format policies intended to extend the longevity of collections under their care. While concerted efforts have been made in the library community to encourage common standards, digital preservation policies regularly vary from one digital library service to another. In the interest of gaining a broad view of contemporary digital preservation practice in North American research libraries, this paper presents the findings of a study of file format policies at Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions. It is intended to present the digital preservation community with an assessment of the level of trust currently placed in common file formats in digital library collections and institutional repositories. Beginning with a summary of file format research to date, the authors describe the research methodology they used to collect and analyze data from the file format policies of ARL Library repositories and digital library services. The paper concludes with a presentation and analysis of findings that explore levels of confidence placed in image, text, audio, video, tabular data, software application, presentation, geospatial, and computer program file formats. The data show that file format policies have evolved little beyond the document and image digitization standards of traditional library reformatting programs, and that current approaches to file format policymaking must evolve to meet the challenges of research libraries' expanding digital repository services.

Digital Repository Services for Managing Research Data: What Do Oxford Researchers Need?

Digital Repository Services for Managing Research Data: What Do Oxford Researchers Need?

Describing Digital Objects: A Tale of Compromise

The Alliance Digital Repository (ADR) is a consortial digital repository service developed by Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (Alliance). This article details how a standard descriptive metadata policy for repository records developed, and how that policy is currently being implemented. All digital objects in the ADR are required to have MODS and OAI-Dublin Core metadata that conform to certain minimum requirements. To help members meet the requirements, Alliance staff and the ADR Metadata Working Group, using tools available in the Fedora/Fez repository environment, have developed a customized set of core ADR material type templates in XSD form.

Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies

Editor’s note: A small group of individuals with expertise on author-rights policies, the campus policy environment, National Institutes of Health (NIH) deposit processes, and digital repository services met in Washington DC on January 9, 2009, under the auspices of ARL’s Public Policy and Scholarly Communication programs. The group explored opportunities, desired outcomes, and policy issues involved in developing capabilities for institutionally mediated deposit processes and content transfer between institution-based and funder-based repositories, particularly PubMed Central. Based on that discussion, the group also identified potential strategies that would lead toward creating the needed rights-management environment and repository services. This essay reflects the January 9 discussions.

Thinking outside the library box

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the emerging concept of local contextualization in digital repositories.Design/methodology/approachThe paper describes the concepts and issues related to local contextualization of digital repositories.FindingsThe paper finds that initial efforts in developing digital repositories focused mainly on digitizing library collections. Emerging trends indicate that expectations of patrons have changed and are increasingly tied to the collection and maintenance of materials that are not directly owned by the library. As repositories continue to evolve, libraries will need to be more proactive in contextualizing their digital repositories to the local environment. Unlike the current “one size fits all” model of digital repositories, contextualization emphasized thoughtful planning and implementation of services that are relevant to the local environment.Originality/valueThis paper describes an emerging trend in digital repository services.

Automated Migration for Image Preservation

Format migration is recognized as one of the most important potential strategies for ensuring the long-term usability of stored digital assets. The Harvard University Library is investigating the issues surrounding the design and implementation of an automated process for large-scale format migration, with initial emphasis placed on transforming GIF, JPEG, and TIFF images to JPEG 2000 form. This paper will review the findings of Harvard's initial exploration of automated migration as a participant in the Library of Congress's Archive Ingest and Handling Test and subsequent activities towards providing a migration capability for its Digital Repository Service. The significant issues in this investigation include: source population eligibility, resultant image profile selection, automated workflows, post-migration quality assurance testing, provenance metadata, final disposition of source images, and applicable preservation policies.

Steering Resources to Safe-Harbor Repositories: The Need for Reliable, Accurate and Affordable Ingest Services

With the emergence of centralized, large-scale digital archives, geography becomes a key factor in the preservation of cultural heritage materials. Objects “inside” archives will be actively monitored and managed, whereas those “outside” will be at greater risk of loss and obsolescence. Developing ingest systems and services to process, package and transport objects into managed safe-harbor repositories is an immediate need. Standards, frameworks, and business models for digital archiving must also evolve in due time to support these services.Ingest solutions must address a range of challenges: legal, technical, and financial. Software development, however, is a logical starting point, since tools that automate pre-archiving tasks meet technical requirements for viability and economic ones for affordability. The key tasks to automate are production of preservation metadata, transformation and validation of formats, and creation of repository-compliant transfer packages.The Harvard University Library (HUL) Office for Information Systems (OIS) has developed two applications to promote use of the HUL Digital Repository Service. JHOVE, developed with JSTOR, is a format-validation program; Dmart is a batch deposit tool for audio preservation packages. In Harvard's experience, the target user for such applications has typically been a professional depositing agent with technical expertise, who consults as needed with curatorial experts.With greater understanding of ingest requirements, and the profiles of persons or agencies likely to perform these services, it is hoped that industry will develop and support tools for the digital archiving market.