This document discusses practical steps for digital preservation at institutional levels. It addresses questions of who is responsible for digital preservation, when preservation activities should take place, and what materials should be preserved. Responsibilities could fall to national libraries, membership organizations, or commercial entities. Institutions should focus on preserving local scholarly works, learning materials, records, and experimental data in both the short and long term by planning requirements and formats. An example system called CDocS that automatically collects metadata and produces documents in XML is also outlined.

1. Practical steps
towards digital
preservation at
institutional levels
Chris Rusbridge
09/25/12 1

2. Contents
• Who has responsibility?
• When?
• What?
• CDocS example
09/25/12 2

3. Who has responsibility?
• National bodies?
– National & copyright libraries?
– JISC? AHDS etc?
• Consortia, membership
organisations?
– CURL, RLG?
– Regional groups?
• Commercial operations?
– OCLC, NDAD?
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4. Institutional
responsibility?
• Local scholarly material
• Learning materials
• Institutional records
• Experimental data & notebooks
• Licensed material??
• Might be out-sourced
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5. When?
• Short term
– Think! Avoid stupid things!!
• Medium term
– Review requirements
– Ensure you can keep bits
– Plan
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6. When?
• Long term
– Pilot
– Modify
– Deploy
– Expand
– Review
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7. What?
• Digitised stuff
– not a priority
– think about metadata & formats
• Databases
– think about meaning, codes,
consistency
• Web pages
– think about value, significant
properties etc
09/25/12 7

8. What?
• Documents
– less significant if paper files exist
• Records
– decisions, minutes, proposals,
policies
– may be documents, may be email,
may be memos, often mixed!
– Legal obligations exist (to keep & to
destroy)
– PROBLEM AREA
09/25/12 8

9. CDocS example
• Committee Document System
• Collects metadata automatically
• Produces documents in XML
• Documents prepared in Word
(with macros)
• Documents viewable on web in
HTML, or in Word formats
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