Dorothea Salo
University of Wisconsin
salo@wisc.edu

Institutional repositories
for the digital arts and
humanities
Dorothea Salo
University of Wisconsin
salo@wisc.edu

Preservation for the
digital arts and
humanities
Dorothea Salo
University of Wisconsin
salo@wisc.edu

Dorothea Salo
University of Wisconsin
salo@wisc.edu
Preservation and
institutional repositories
for the digital arts and
humanities

And I said...
... you’re giving me how
much time for this?

Environment
•As several of you are intimately aware, higher ed
is trying to figure out What To Do About Data.
•This spells opportunity... IF you can get a seat at
the table, and IF you know what to ask for!
• Humanists will not be the first people they think of, sadly.
•Serious (insoluble?) problem: data diversity
• Expect compromise “solutions.”
•Do not let IT pros intimidate you.
• They do not know everything they think they know.

PICK
SOFTWARE
LAST.
Friendly word
of advice:
Photo: “Briana Calderon; future educator of america.”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46132085@N03/4703617843/
Arielle Calderon / CC-BY 2.0

IT’S WHAT
THE SOFTWARE
WON’T DO.
It’s not what the
software does
that’ll kill you.
Photo: “Briana Calderon; future educator of america.”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46132085@N03/4703617843/
Arielle Calderon / CC-BY 2.0

DON’T CHASE
THE SHINY.
Another friendly word of
advice:
Photo: “Sparkle Texture”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbylanes/3214921616/
Abby Lane / CC-BY 2.0

it’s much less
shiny.
In five years...
Photo: “Sparkle Texture”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbylanes/3214921616/
Abby Lane / CC-BY 2.0

it’s not shiny
at all.
In ten years...
Photo: “Sparkle Texture”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abbylanes/3214921616/
Abby Lane / CC-BY 2.0

In twenty years...
it’s probably
useless.

NOT A SOLUTION:
your graduate students
•You have a bright, tech-savvy grad student.
•She builds an Awesome Tech Thing.
•You have no idea how it works.
•She graduates. You’re hosed.
• Because she didn’t (know how to) build it sustainably...
• Because you don’t have any documentation...
• Because nobody made contingency plans for it...
•I have seen this pattern over and over again.
• It’s killed more digital culture and research materials than
anything I can think of in academe.

Am I saying “don’t experiment?”
•Nah, of course not.
•I’m saying “know what an experiment means.”
•I’m saying “don’t mistake an experiment for an
archive.”
•I’m saying “don’t experiment and then expect
everybody else to pick up your pieces because
you didn’t plan for metadata or preservation.”

That said?
•You gotta do what you gotta do.
•Some friendly advice:
• Know where the exits are. (Can you export your data? In a
reusable format?)
• When you finish a project, USE that export.
• Triply true if you’re relying on the cloud!
•Your overriding goal, while a project is in
progress: keep your eventual options open!
•Long-term... is a totally other kettle of fish.

Your best strategy
•The single best strategy for a digital humanist
concerned about long-term preservation...
•... is to figure out how to make it Somebody
Else’s Problem.
• Right now, this is hard. I do believe it will get easier.
•It’s a lot easier to figure this out from the
start than at the end.
• Different Somebody Elses will have different things that
they want. If you know that from the get-go, you’re much
better off.

Institution-internal solutions

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own
• Please don’t, if you can possibly avoid it.

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own
• Please don’t, if you can possibly avoid it.
•Adopting open-source software

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own
• Please don’t, if you can possibly avoid it.
•Adopting open-source software
• e.g. Omeka, Dataverse, ArchivesSpace...

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own
• Please don’t, if you can possibly avoid it.
•Adopting open-source software
• e.g. Omeka, Dataverse, ArchivesSpace...
• Better, but not foolproof. Upgrades? Security? Backups?

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own
• Please don’t, if you can possibly avoid it.
•Adopting open-source software
• e.g. Omeka, Dataverse, ArchivesSpace...
• Better, but not foolproof. Upgrades? Security? Backups?
• Writing plugins/mods = rolling your own. Avoid if possible.

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own
• Please don’t, if you can possibly avoid it.
•Adopting open-source software
• e.g. Omeka, Dataverse, ArchivesSpace...
• Better, but not foolproof. Upgrades? Security? Backups?
• Writing plugins/mods = rolling your own. Avoid if possible.
•Adopting institutional infrastructure

Institution-internal solutions
•Rolling your own
• Please don’t, if you can possibly avoid it.
•Adopting open-source software
• e.g. Omeka, Dataverse, ArchivesSpace...
• Better, but not foolproof. Upgrades? Security? Backups?
• Writing plugins/mods = rolling your own. Avoid if possible.
•Adopting institutional infrastructure
• Make sure it’ll survive your departure from the institution!

Outside the institution

Outside the institution
•Lists of data repositories

Outside the institution
•Lists of data repositories
• Databib: http://databib.org/

Outside the institution
•Lists of data repositories
• Databib: http://databib.org/
• re3data: http://re3data.org/

Outside the institution
•Lists of data repositories
• Databib: http://databib.org/
• re3data: http://re3data.org/
• N.b. you will find less here on the humanities than you
would probably prefer. Long story.

Outside the institution
•Lists of data repositories
• Databib: http://databib.org/
• re3data: http://re3data.org/
• N.b. you will find less here on the humanities than you
would probably prefer. Long story.
•Figshare

Outside the institution
•Lists of data repositories
• Databib: http://databib.org/
• re3data: http://re3data.org/
• N.b. you will find less here on the humanities than you
would probably prefer. Long story.
•Figshare
• ... and other web services springing up, e.g. omeka.net

You will be limited by...
•Infrastructure your library/IT has already
committed to
• this is why you want to be in on ground-floor discussions!
•Their willingness and ability to tweak, rewrite,
or replace it with something suiting your needs
•Your willingness and ability to evaluate, install,
and maintain a software stack that suits you
• ... perhaps indefinitely!
•The availability of hosted solutions, and your
ability to pay for them (perhaps indefinitely!)

You need to know
what the options are like.
•Your library and IT folks may well need
guidance. At minimum, they need clearly-
expressed requirements.
•The requirements you give them need to go
beyond end-user access, use, and UI.
• Back end: getting material in as efficiently as possible,
allowing for additions/changes/deletions
• Preservation requirements
• Data and metadata purity, clarity, preservability,
reusability, mashuppability, migratability, standards

Institutional
repositories

What’s an IR?
•“‘[A]ttics’ (and often fairly empty ones), with
random assortments of content of
questionable importance”
• Brown, Griffiths, Rascoff, “University publishing in a digital
age.” Ithaka 2007. http://www.sr.ithaka.org/research-
publications/university-publishing-digital-age
•A basic digital preservation-and-access
platform designed to allow faculty to deposit
and describe single PDFs.
•Quite commonly available in research libraries
or through library consortia.
• You probably have one available to you!

IR software
•Open source
• Fedora Commons: http://fedora-commons.info/ (you’ll
need a layer on top of this)
• DSpace: http://dspace.org/
• EPrints: http://eprints.org/
•Commercial
• ContentDM: http://contentdm.com/
• DigiTool: http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/category/
DigiToolOverview
•Hosted
• ContentDM: http://contentdm.com/
• BePress: http://bepress.com/

Two minutes!
•Find an IR available to you for depositing
content.

You can typically expect...
•To get in touch with someone in the library to
get an account set up, and a space for you to
deposit into
• Have a collection name and description ready.
• Default descriptors, if you have any, also a good idea.
• Need access controls? To delegate deposit? Talk about this.
•To be able to put materials in on your own,
through web forms
• To find the deposit process fiddly and annoying
•To have material appear on the web right after
deposit.

IRs work for...
•Small(ish), discrete files that never change
• So an Excel-using researcher is just fine with an IR.
•Documentation for data held elsewhere
•Some IRs can handle static website captures.
•Files with uncomplicated IP lives
• ... which complicates the “static website” question.
•Access restriction may be possible, as may
dark archiving; it depends on the IR platform.
Expect it to be annoying to implement, though.

IRs don’t work for
•Really Big Data
• including, sometimes, audio and video
• This is less a reflection on IR software than of most IRs being
horribly underprovisioned with storage and bandwidth.
•Work in progress; files that may change or be
updated
•Complex digital objects (except static websites)
•Digital objects that need interactivity
• Even something as simple as video streaming. IRs can’t.
•Anything that needs a DOI. (You’ll get a
permanent identifier, but it won’t be a DOI.)
•Datasets where the researcher wants to vet any
potential reusers

Digital libraries

Digital-library software
• Omeka, Greenstone (aging), ContentDM...
• Again, chances are your library already has some kind
of digital-collections software.
• Go ask a librarian what it is, and whether you can add material to it!
• Also ask if it’s attached to any kind of digitization or metadata-help
service. It may not be, but you never know.
• If not, there are hosted options
• if you’re prepared to pay for them indefinitely.
• Designed for image exhibitions
• May extend to audio and video, but UI won’t be ideal.
• May extend to page-scanned books, but may not. (Omeka is terrible
at these.)

Be aware
•The digital-preservation underpinnings of this
class of software are weak to nonexistent.
• It’s designed for exhibiting, not for archiving!
• It may also entice you into poor sustainability decisions,
such as using web-friendly but lossy JPG as your master
image format. Or not making backups.
•On the plus side, though, if it’s a library service,
the library feels an institutional commitment
to the materials in it.
• That’s a lot of the preservation battle won, right there.

Emerging solutions
•Often involve combining software to attack
different parts of the problem
• Preservation underlayers: Fedora Commons, microservices
• Deposit and management UI: Hydra, Islandora
• End-user UI: Hydra, Islandora, Omeka, plugins, mods, etc.
•Are still pretty DIY at this point
• If your library is doing active development, you’re one of
the lucky ones.
• The rest of you may have to wait. And lobby.

Archives platforms
•Designed for coping with an undifferentiated
mess of random digital stuff.
• I know, right? Nobody has that problem...
•Not usually designed to help other people use
or interact with that stuff.
• Also, designed for archivists’ ways of thinking. Archivists are
humanists, but not all humanists are archivists.
• Worth getting a software tour from an archivist!
•Archivematica, ArchivesSpace (in beta), Duke
Data Accessioner, CollectiveAccess, BitCurator

Data-management platforms
•Usually designed for the sciences, not the
humanities!
• But that doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t work for what
you have in mind.
• (“E-lab notebooks” will probably feel pretty foreign, though.)
•Look at Dataverse Network, http://thedata.org/
•Gigantor lists of everything ever:
• http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/external/tools-services/
archiving-and-preserving-information
• http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/categories/publishing
• http://foss4lib.org/packages
• Less helpful than you might think; there’s rarely any decision
apparatus alongside.

Dorothea’s cantankerous, crabby,
cynical, crude, choleric, churlish,
other-words-beginning-with-C
take on digital humanists working
with librarians and IT pros

Neil Gaiman on George R.R.
Martin and his eager fans
CENSORED
CENSORED
From: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html

Digital humanists:
Librarians and IT
professionals are
not your bitch.CENSORED

Not entirely your fault!
•$$$ is a consideration, unfortunately
• The sciences have it. Unfortunately.
•Your colleagues may have poisoned the well by
being prima donnas, even though you’re not!
•Different professional-advancement
infrastructure
•We may just. not. be. ready.
• Or the infrastructure we rely on may not be.

DH and libraries should be friends
•Involve the library from the outset.
• Please do NOT ask us to pick up your messes at the end!
• Expect us to have work for you to do, and quality expectations.
• Yes, I know that’s how it used to work with analog materials
and archivists. Digital is different.
•Come to us in groups.
• We serve all of campus. We cannot afford to move heaven and
earth for any one person. Please don’t be a prima donna!
• At minimum, have an idea how what you’re asking will
concretely benefit other campus constituencies.
•Offer quid pro quo. What’s in it for us?
• (Library advocacy in high places is always a good trade.)
•Be patient, please.
• We don’t turn on a dime.

Will this always work?
•Sadly, no.
•A good many libraries are just not ready to
take digital preservation and DH support
seriously.
• The presence of a “DH center” in the library is not always
proof of serious intent.
•Others have been burned before.
•Still others are skeptics.
•I can’t promise you’ll find help in the library, or
with campus IT. I can promise you won’t if you
don’t seriously approach them.
• (Miriam Posner’s article is a must-read!)

Thanks!
Questions?