Repositories in Context Digital repositories as components of an integrated infrastructure for education

1. Repositories in ContextDigital repositories as components of an integrated infrastructure for education Leona Carpenter Programme Director JISC Development Group

2. Acknowledgements • Neil Jacobs • Programme Manager forthe JISC Digital Repositories Programme … and other JISC colleagues • Rachel Heery of UKOLN andSheila Anderson of the Arts & Humanities Data Service • Authors of the Digital Repositories Review

3. A definition… “a place where a range of digital materials may be stored, and which does have an associated rationale in terms of what is being stored and what usage the repository is set up to serve”

4. Another definition… content is deposited in a repository, whether by the content creator, owner or third party on their behalf; the repository architecture manages content as well as metadata; the repository offers minimum basic services (put, get, search); the repository must be sustainable and trusted in terms of being well-supported and well-managed.

5. Committees & Consultation e-Learning e-Research e-Administration e-Resources Services Development Programmes Information Environment Middleware Network Outreach & Embedding Repositories within JISC activities

6. Repository-related activities

7. Current issues • Institutions need support for digital preservation & asset management actions • The everyday institutional benefits of repositories are often not visible • Work in the repositories field is fragmented between different communities • The current JISC Information Environment architecture needs expanding to account for: • Lifecycle approach to digital objects • Ecology of repository interactions

8. Digital preservation in institutions • Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions • Initiatives to provide practical support • Ensure future access to digital information • 11 projects funded, at 19 institutions • HE & FE • archives • other bodies

9. Three development themes • Institutional Management Support • Six projects • Digital Preservation Assessment Tools • One project • Institutional Repository Development • Three projects • … and one cross-theme project (themes 1 and 3)

10. The assessment tools project • Digital Asset Assessment Tool (DAAT) • To develop a tool to assess preservation needs of digital holdings • October 2004 – September 2006 • University of London Computer Centre with the Arts and Humanities Data Service, National Preservation Office, The National Archives, British Library, Kings College London, School of Advanced Study of the University of London, Digital Preservation Coalition

11. Institutional Repository Development • Assessment of UK Data Archive and The National Archives compliance with OAIS and METS • To map their systems and metadata to • Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model • Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard • November 2004 – March 2005 • UK Data Archive at the University of Essex with The National Archives

12. Institutional Repository Development • Preservation Eprint Services (PRESERV) • To implement an ingest service, based on the OAIS digital preservation reference model, for archives built using Eprints.org software • October 2004 – September 2006 • University of Southampton, with The National Archives, The British Library, and Oxford University

13. Institutional Repository Development • SHERPA Digital Preservation: Creating a persistent environment for institutional repositories • To create a collaborative preservation environment for the SHERPA institutional repositories project • March 2005 – February 2007 • Arts and Humanities Data Service with the University of Nottingham; Consortium of University Research Libraries also support

14. Cross-theme project • Digital Archival Exemplars for Private Papers • Themes 1 and 3; Jan 2005 – Dec 2006 • To provide a best-practice template for establishing long-term access to private papers in digital form • papers of contemporary politicians • one Labour, one Conservative – at least • Oxford University with University of Manchester

15. Aims of the new Digital Repositories Programme • To embed repositories within everyday information landscape in FE and HE • To enable effective communication between different communities • To work toward a single JISC framework, covering learning, research and supporting systems…

16. User requirements / use cases Metadata standards Metadata quality Persistent identifiers Version control Quality assurance Provenance Legal issues Priority areas

17. Objectives of the new repositories programme • community needs; • cultural & practical issues for implementation and use of institutional repositories; • repository specifications, software and tools; • a common [distributed] national repository service infrastructure; • repository functional components / frameworks; • guidelines and exemplars.

18. Activity areas

19. By the end of this programme, we hope to have… …enabled the community to build useful repositories easily, and to have scoped the services framework needed for a distributed national / international repositories resource.

20. Current issues • Institutions need support for digital preservation & asset management functions • The everyday institutional benefits of repositories are often not visible • Work in the repositories field is fragmented between different communities • The current JISC Information Environment architecture needs expanding to account for: • Lifecycle approach to digital objects • Ecology of repository interactions