Planning, Marketing and Assessing a Digital Library:The Open University Digital Archive (OUDA)

The Open University Digital Archive (OUDA)
Phase 1:
I. OUDA literature review
II. Planning OUDA as a preservation repository
III. Marketing OUDA preservation capabilities to internal stakeholders
IV. Assessing OUDA as an accessible preservation system
Stephen J. Stose
Metadata Officer
The Open University
Library Services

Table of Contents

I. OUDA literature review (p. 3)
Introduction and literature review scope
Overview
Planning OUDA
Digital preservation planning and procedure
Preservation as business strategy
Repository infrastructure
Marketing OUDA
Marketing and communications strategy
Stakeholder involvement
Profiling for feedback and evaluation
Assessing OUDA
The OUDA evaluation framework: The triptych model
Performance
Usefulness
Usability
Conclusions
II. Planning OUDA as a preservation repository (p. 19)
Introduction
Relationship to library strategic planning
Purpose
The strategic context
Relevant Literature
Stakeholder and user needs analysis
STELLAR Project: Preliminary stakeholder views assessed
OU Library stakeholders
University stakeholders

2

Students and public stakeholders
Stakeholder benefits, costs and risks
General benefits
Costs and risks
Demand and impact
Recommendations for action
The goals and outcomes of OUDA
Responsible parties
Action plan and timeline
Preliminary communications plan
Forecast budget for OUDA
Pilot testing and scalability
SWOT analysis
Limitations and assumptions
Reflections
III. Marketing OUDA preservation capabilities to internal stakeholders (p. 41)
Introduction
Relevant literature
Marketing goals and outcomes
Positioning statement
Target audience and key messages
Target audience
Key messages
Message delivery strategies
Tools, timeline, and responsible parties
Marketing costs
Mockups of selected marketing methods
Posters
Informational posters and handouts
Project postcard / info-graphic
Reflection
IV. Assessing OUDA as an accessible preservation system (p. 57)

Introduction

Assessment plan for outcomes (with relevant Literature)
Assessment rubric
Outcome 1: Policy plan in place
Outcome 2: Trusted Repository Audit (TRAC)
Outcome 3: Digital object prototypes established
Outcome 4: Repository interface established (and is usable)
Outcome 5: Metadata is linkable
Outcome 6: Stakeholder feedback on usefulness (STELLAR re-visited)
Reflection
Bibliography

3

Phase 1:
OUDA literature review
Introduction and literature review scope
This paper presents a review of some of the important contributions to the literature on
planning, marketing, and assessing a developmental prototype of a digital repository to
archive and preserve university generated content. Its plan for development is in response
to increasing demand from Open University (OU) stakeholders to provision content
management services for university-generated material that requires long-term sustainable
access and preservation management. The Open University Digital Archive (OUDA) is our
solution to providing core information and enterprise content management systems to
service the needs of the Open University’s online educational model and corporate e-
business.
The literature review forms part of a discussion document. It relates to the initial phase of
the development of the digital archive (i.e., OUDA) per se. More specifically, it will form the
basis towards the discussion of three important aspect of developing this digital archive
project:
1) Planning OUDA as a preservation repository
2) Marketing OUDA preservation capabilities to internal stakeholders
3) Assessing OUDA as an accessible preservation system
The planning documentation will discuss the business model project plan for OUDA and
how it is to satisfy both library and university strategic planning. Marketing the prototype
will focus specifically on our plan to position OUDA with regards to its target audience and
stakeholders (e.g., administrators, researchers, lecturers, staff, and to a lesser extent
students). A public and student-focused release belongs to a later phase. The assessment
will specify a plan to test the system landscape and whether it can appropriately satisfy its
stated service outcomes as an accessible system of preservation.
This is not an exhaustive literature review. For a nearly exhaustive bibliography of recent
papers related to institutional repositories1
and digital curation and preservation2
, please
see the work of Charles W. Bailey (2011, 2010, respectively).

1
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/irb/irb.html
2
http://www.digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb.htm

4

Overview
We will focus here on two overarching goals deemed critical to the successful
implementation of a digital archive system to hold and preserve the university’s legacy
material. They are:
A. Preservation policy and repository infrastructure
B. Access (usefulness and usability) and content re-use
Broadly envisioned, these goals will also form the basis for the global outcomes upon
which our evaluations and assessment of Phase One planning will hang. These global
outcomes are rooted firmly in the OU Library’s long-term mission and strategic priorities,
which are nested within and conform to university priorities. These are specified more
expansively in the planning documentation below.
Briefly, as library for this online university, our chief mission is to achieve efficiency savings
for faculty and researchers who develop content. For this reason, the current paper will
review best practices and standards with regards to achieving the long-term preservation
of legacy course material within a robust, extensible, and modular systems architecture
that we propose to build.
Our chief goal for Phase One planning (a two-year plan) is encompassed in the statement
below:
Good preservation infrastructure and planning will facilitate the long-term usable
and useful access to materials previously used (i.e., legacy) in course e-production
and presentation. This will facilitate the re-use of non-current OU learning material,
enabling it to serve as a model for future course material production and reduce its
unnecessary duplication, and serve to contextualize the history and enhance the
reputation of OU’s model of higher online education.
Planning OUDA
Digital preservation planning and procedure
The Research Libraries Group (2002) defines digital preservation somewhat differently
than most readers are accustomed to thinking about physical preservation. They write:
Digital preservation is defined as the managed activities necessary: 1) For the long
term maintenance of a byte stream (including metadata) sufficient to reproduce a
suitable facsimile of the original document and 2) For the continued accessibility of
the document contents through time and changing technology.
An excellent starting point for planning a digital repository for the digital preservation is the
book by Ross Harvey, Digital Curation: A How-to-do-it Manual (2010), and its focus on
organization, staffing, and costs, as well as its adherence to the Digital Curation Centre’s
(DCC) lifecycle model3
, itself an indispensible resource. Complementing this is Alex Ball’s
(2010) DCC report Preservation and Curation in Institutional Repositories. There is also an

3
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/curation-lifecycle-model

5

online tutorial in Digital Preservation Management4
sponsored by Cornell University
Library.
Additionally, every year the Digital Preservation Training Programme5
(DPTP) is held at
the University of London Computer Centre. The Digital Preservation Coalition6
, a non-profit
organization dedicated to the advice and advocacy of enduring digital collections,
sponsors the event.
These essential resources include sections on repository software, preservation
architectures and planning tools, metadata and its tools, media obsolescence, as well as
digital object identifier schemes. They also place fundamental stress on conforming to the
Open Archival Information System’s (OAIS) reference model, published by the
Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (2102), and reproduced in Figure 1
below.

Figure
1

The OAIS model focuses on the long-term impact of changing technologies, multimedia
and data formats, and a changing user community (Consultative Committee for Space
Data Systems, 2002). Lavoie (2004) and the Digital Preservation Coalition have published
an introductory guide to this model, which explains the concept of an information package.
The information package contains three basic elements required to ensure that digital
materials can be preserved independent of specific technology, and one that guarantees a
degree of object persistence (see LeFurgy, 2002, for a good explanation). They are:
1) Content information (the bits/bytes with details on bit interpretation)
2) Preservation information (provenance, fixity/authenticity, reference)
3) Descriptive information (identification metadata)
This single logical package is usually structured in an XML metadata wrapper (i.e.,
FOXML, METS). The submitted information package (SIP), delivered by its producer to be
archived, may or may represent the same form when the package is stored as an archived
information package (AIP). Nor will it necessarily represent the same form when the
package is accessed as a dissemination information package (DIP). That is, when users
actually see how the archived object is presented and described on-screen.

4
http://www.dpworkshop.org/dpm-eng/contents.html
5
http://www.dptp.org/
6
http://www.dpconline.org/

6

Subsequent efforts made by the Working Group on Digital Archive Attributes (OCLC-RLG,
2002) expanded on the OAIS model by outlining concrete attributes and responsibilities of
a repository for it to be deemed trustworthy. It is known as the Trustworthy Digital
Repository checklist (TDR), also known as ISO 16363. With the goal of developing a
certification framework with prescriptive intent, the RLG-NARA Digital Repository
Certification Task Force (2007) elaborated on the TDR list of attributes to develop the
Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC7
) standard. TRAC now serves as
an authoritative audit that serves as a checklist of the necessary evidence required to
demonstrate long-term repository viability.
Many advocate for making repository software more “preservation-aware,” and some
(Kaczmarek et al., 2006) have suggested incorporating the TRAC checklist into their
evaluation of repository software. Others have studied the direct effect these tools have on
their repositories. For instance, Vardigan and Cole (2007) applied the OAIS model to a
social science archive. Cornel University applied TRAC to a data staging repository to
study trust in preservation chains (Steinhart, Dietrich & Green, 2009). HathiTrust is also
committed to TRAC as its primary assessment tool, and its website outlines how the
Center For Research Libraries (CRL), which now administers TRAC, has successfully
audited the HathiTrust repository8
.
TRAC is not the only preservation checklist (see TDR, above), but will be the one applied
to OUDA during Phase 1 implementation. Others include:
• Data Asset Framework (DAF)9
• Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA)10
• The Open Planets Foundation (OPF)11
• Life Cycle Information for E-Literature (LIFE)12
Preservation as business strategy
Any preservation policy, however, cannot be developed in isolation, but must be linked to
core institutional business strategy. LIFE, for instance, is a methodology developed by
University College London and the British Library that allows an organization to model the
digital lifecycle of a repository project and determine preservation costs over the next 5, 10
and 20 years.
Some authors (Becker, Kulovits, Guttenbrunner, et al., 2009) make a pragmatic distinction
between concrete preservation plans and high-level policies that regulate and respond to
institutional strategy. For instance, the ICPSR Digital Preservation Policy Framework13
outlines the high-level factors important to establishing an organization’s commitment to
the digital repository. The Northeast Document Conservation Center14
similarly aids in
preservation planning at a higher conceptual level.

7
http://www.crl.edu/archiving-preservation/digital-archives/metrics-assessing-and-certifying-0
8
http://www.hathitrust.org/trac
9
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/repository-audit-and-assessment/data-asset-framework
10
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/repository-audit-and-assessment/drambora
11
http://www.openplanetsfoundation.org/
12
http://www.life.ac.uk/
13
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/datamanagement/preservation/policies/dpp-framework.html
14
http://www.nedcc.org/assets/media/documents/DigitalPreservationSelfAssessmentfinal.pdf

7

A JISC commissioned study (Beagrie, Semple, Williams et al., 2008) provides a good
model to follow when formulating high-level digital preservation policy. They specifically
outline the priorities digital repository managers must address, if the preservation
repository is to survive over the long-term as part of the organizational business culture
(see also Seamus, 2012). For the current review, I combine the priorities of this JISC
study with the priorities the ICPSR Digital Preservation Policy Framework have outlined.
These are:
• Organizational viability: How will preservation serve organizational need, and who
are its stakeholders?
• How will it be integrated into and how does it relate to other organizational strategic
priorities?
• What are the objectives of preservation and how will these be supported?
• Has the content it will potentially store been defined and delimited? What kinds of
collections will it store?
• Who is procedurally accountable to these policies and what are their obligations?
• Who is financially and organizationally responsible for sustaining the repository?
While these high-level policy guides provide important and useful recommendations by
setting a framework for concrete planning, they do not provide actionable and concrete
steps towards ensuring long-term access to the repository. For this reason we, like Becker,
Kulovits, Guttenbrunner, et al. (2009), think it potentially useful to distinguish between a
set of high-level preservation policies and a preservation plan. Similarly, the JISC
commissioned study (Beagrie, Semple, Williams et al., 2008) also distinguishes between
high-level “policy clauses” and concrete “implementation clauses.”
In any event, most institutions do not differentiate, but include both high-level and concrete
implementation actions under the rubric of “preservation policy.” That is, the state of
preservation policy around the globe is still quite developmental. Sheldon (2013), as a
Fellow in the Library of Congress, analyzed 33 digital preservation policies, strategies and
plans (variously named) in order to develop a taxonomy of topics covered by the
documents. What is useful about this is that she includes links to the 33 policies
themselves, equally divided between Europe and North America, and libraries and
archives.
In their “Survey of Institutional Readiness,” Kenney and Buckley (2005) found only about
half of 114 organizations with digital repositories had preservation policies written, while a
mere third had vetted and implemented these across management levels. While slightly
broader than the topics Sheldon extracted, they cover the same kind of questions
librarians and archivists need to ask themselves when planning a repository. They include:
• Costs and long-term funding arrangements for maintaining the repository
• Staffing roles and responsibilities (organizational and technical expertise)
• Submission guidelines (who can ingest what, and the criteria for its selection)
• Descriptions of the collection and the objects it will contain
• Object format guidelines
• Authentication mechanisms (to track users and object submission)
• Procedures for content quality and information package quality control
• Object persistence and validation procedures (e.g., checksum identity)
• Metadata policies (including preservation actions and events)
• Procedures and policies for clearing intellectual rights

8

• Storage, duplication and backup
• System inter-operability, security, and data sharing policies
The same survey indicated that only 38% of these organizations reported they had
sustainable funding or some other form of ongoing commitment to the long-term
maintenance of the repository, while the rest did not or did not know. Additionally, the
survey found that institutions felt they lacked organizational expertise much more than
technological expertise. This is also reflected in the fact that nearly 65% of participating
organizations felt the biggest threat to their digital materials was the lack of a preservation
policy.
Li and Banach (2011) later repeated this survey in modified form. While direct
comparisons are impossible, they found a higher percentage (63%) of organizations had
sustainable long-term funding secured, and 66% of respondents reported that they were
currently formulating long-term preservation policies, with a mere 16% indicating they had
full preservation compliance policies already implemented.
Thus, preservation cannot merely be viewed as an issue of enabling and configuring the
correct software implementation. Wilczek and Glick (2006) write:
It seems obvious that no existing software application could serve on its own as a
trustworthy preservation system. Preservation is the act of physically and
intellectually protecting and technically stabilizing the transmission of the content
and context of electronic records across space and time, in order to produce copies
of those records that people can reasonably judge to be authentic. To accomplish
this, the preservation system requires natural and juridical people, institutions,
applications, infrastructure, and procedures.
While the TRAC audit takes very concrete steps to ensure that the software system is
serving the strategic purpose of long-term digital preservation, it seems digital library
managers have a lot of work ahead in defining a common set of high-level organizational
policies and concrete organizational implementation plans for ensuring the repository’s
long-term institutional viability.
Repository infrastructure
The selection of a repository must be in response to the underlying archival needs of the
organization. These should be aligned quite closely with preservation policy, and should
be developed in tandem. Traditionally, digital library infrastructure has been developed
between network information, computer and information and library science professionals,
each field operating upon a different set of philosophical assumptions. The trade-off of
managing the longevity of materials while keeping up with the astonishing pace of evolving
hardware, web, and data-sharing standards implies an “architectural moving target”
(Suleman & Fox, 2001).
Recent studies such as the JISC funded Repository Support Project15
(2010) and that by
the National Library of Medicine have undertaken studies comparing repository software.
The former compares specific repository capabilities against one another, and the latter

15
http://www.rsp.ac.uk/start/software-survey/results-2010/

9

compares features in context against local functional requirements. The ability to preserve
the fixity of a digital object is key here. Jantz and Giarlo (2005) are explicit in their
description of the architectural attributes required for the creation of a trusted technological
framework upon which a long-term repository of digital objects can be built. They define a
digital object as:
A basic unit of both access and digital preservation and one that contains all of the
relevant pieces of information required to reproduce the document including
metadata, byte streams, and special scripts that govern dynamic behavior.
Firstly, this conforms to the Research Libraries Group (2002) definition of digital
preservation cited above. It 1) ensures the “long term maintenance of a byte stream
(including metadata) sufficient to reproduce a suitable facsimile of the original document”,
and 2) allows for “the continued accessibility of the document contents through time and
changing technology.”
Secondly, the digital object’s persistence over time requires that its storage and retrieval
exist independent of any particular software architectural framework. This is what Suleman
and Fox (2001) mean by an “architectural moving target.”
The Open University Library had little trouble coming to a conclusion about using the
Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture)16
digital repository
framework. The requirements listed here severely limit the choice of a trusted digital
repository.
We are especially guided by the work of the London School of Economics and Political
Science (LSE)17
and their choice of repository based on their own contextual analysis of
factors (Fay, 2010). This study compared DSpace 1.6, EPrints 3.2.0 and Fedora 3.3.
DSpace and EPrints have strengths for open access publication databases, something
The Open University Library already has in place (ORO: Open Research Online18
, which
uses EPrints). These are monolithic repositories that package multiple functionalities into
one piece of software (i.e., they are non-modular), but which do not provide functionality
for born-digital archives and digitized materials, both fundamental to the goals of OUDA.
Fedora has a flexible and extensible repository core that can be customized to local
context, often with additional modular software add-ons (e.g., Solr indexing, Fedora
GSearch, Mulgara triple store, and a Zend PHP web application). This modularity ensures
continual software independence, even if set-up costs are significantly greater. This
reduces chances that the repository will become another “silo” that cannot be interfaced
with existing library and university systems through relational metadata and RESTful
access points.
Additionally, Fedora’s stores digital objects independent of the repository itself, and from
these objects alone Fedora can be rebuilt. This is critical for preservation purposes.
Fedora, in contrast to DSpace and EPrints, also allows for complex object types, persistent
identifier schemas, bitstream preservation tools, customizable ingest workflows, and RDF
relationship data and search capabilities (see Fay, 2010, for further explanation).

16
http://www.fedora-commons.org/

17
http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/

18
http://oro.open.ac.uk/

10

Marketing OUDA
Gupta and Savard (2010) present an outline of how libraries have had to adapt over the
years to different conceptions of what a library collection and a service model constitutes,
and thus have had to adapt their marketing strategies accordingly. One recent upshot is
that libraries no longer serve as the default go-to resource for information discovery and
research, especially in the last 10 years with the rise of Google and the Net Generation (Mi
& Nesta, 2006).
For instance, an OCLC survey shows that while 45% of university students agree that
libraries provide useful information, a mere 2% start their research using a library web site.
In a comparison of search engines and libraries, the former were preferred for reliability,
cost effectiveness, ease of use, convenience and speed; libraries were preferred for
credibility and accuracy of information (De Rosa et al. 2005).
There are many other reasons for not planning or using a digital repository, chief among
these are the costs, its learning curve, technical impediments to infrastructure deployment,
copyright concerns, organizational adherence, and content duplication and integration with
other existing systems (see Davis & Connolly, 2007).
Librarians may want to shout out “build it and they will come,” but this is likely a poor
reflection of what really happens when trying to establish a digital repository within an
organization or academic institution. Digital repositories will not sell themselves, regardless
of how robust the infrastructure is for preservation and workflow, nor how much they
conform to OAIS or TRAC auditing standards. For this reason, again, we must concern
ourselves with the high-level policy concerns.
Collier (2010) has published an edited book on business planning in digital libraries,
something he sees as rather neglected relative to technical and metadata development.
He defines this in the following way:
Business planning for digital libraries is here defined as the process by which the
business aims, products and services of the eventual system are identified, together
with how the digital library service will contribute to the overall business and mission
of the host organizations. These provide the context and rationale, which is then
combined with normal business plan elements such as technical solution,
investment, income expenditure, projected benefits or returns, marketing, risk
analysis, management and governance.
Thus, having full library and university cooperation and business support for a digital
library’s long-term technical, financial, managerial, and administrative sustenance is
essential.
Marketing and Communications Strategy
Heleen Gierveld (2006) argues that the development and management of a digital
repository depends on strategic social marketing tools that communicate by informing and
explaining, educating and stimulating, involving and inviting, and attracting the attention of
stakeholders and potential users. She stresses two of the “8 Ps” of the service marketing
mix (Wirtz, Chew & Lovelock, 2012), product and promotion, and provides a framework for

11

how to promote a digital repository as a product, even if as an intangible product (see also
Ferreira, Rodrigues, Baptista & Saraiva, 2008). In doing so, she outlines four-strand
communication strategy that we adapt here. It includes:
1) Consultation strategy: collecting feedback information regarding stakeholder
requirements, and engaging stakeholders regarding their domain-specific needs.
2) Pull strategy: attracting engagement and use by offering incentives, making it
attractive, informing users of practicalities of its use.
3) Push strategy: communicating the positive effects use and engagement will bring
about, and encouraging conditions that involve all relevant stakeholders to
participate (e.g., integrating the repository with existing systems).
4) Profiling strategy: using traditional media (websites, brochures, newsletters etc.) to
convince, educate, and raise awareness.
The most immediate and important strategy is university consultation. This is a two-sided
process. One the one hand, consultation represents the need to develop and cultivate
strong relationships with the relevant stakeholders in order to learn about what uses they
envision having for the product, and how they might be able to utilize your product and
potentially integrate it across the organization (Henderson, 2005). This allows a way to
push potential positive effects of participation by eliciting (pulling) their involvement and
making its realization an attractive prospect through the use of profiling strategies, such as
internal newsletters, blogs, posters and talks delivered to relevant stakeholder groups.
In doing so, we also stress that marketing is the tool used to justify expenditures and
costs, IT support for hardware servers, cooperation on preservation policies, and
institutional integration of the repository into the core business processes.
Stakeholder involvement
The first order of business in planning the repository is identifying and analysing the needs
of existing stakeholders. For the initial phase, our stakeholders will be exclusively internal
users. We will consult high-level managers and administrators, research staff and
lecturers, and content producers in the Open Media Unit (OMU) and Learning and
Teaching Solutions (LTS) in order to survey their needs, concerns, and possible ways of
integrating the service with other existing digital lifecycle and workflow processes.
Much of marketing is the creation of particular perceptions. We must create the perception
of university library efficiency and effectiveness, recognizing that different stakeholder
groups have varying perspectives on what this might mean (Cullen & Calvert, 1995). In so
doing, we will segment their various domains of expertise and organizational purpose, and
survey the potential value having a repository of legacy material available might add to
their workflow and digital lifecycle processes.
We must also create the perception of trust. Van House (2002) emphasizes that data
sharing enabled by digital networking technologies implicitly hinges on trust. Trust in the
authority and credibility of data when accessing it, and trust that potential users will not
misuse data after accessing it. As mentioned above, users turn to libraries foremost
because they believe them to be credible and accurate. Trust in repositories is a main goal

12

of the TRAC audit outlined above, and our compliance serves as one of the main goals
when we evaluate our outcomes of OUDA (for issues of repository trust, see Steinhart,
Dietrich & Green, 2009; Ross, 2012; Prieto, 2009).
Profiling for feedback and evaluation
The second order of business in creating a successful repository will be to properly profile
the potential service. With any technical project, this process must be very wary of the
various levels of technical understanding. Maintaining IT support for servers and storage
systems requires a different language than speaking with high-level managers in
justification for continued financial support.
The consultation process itself will provide the fodder for planting the seeds of product
promotion. That is key here. The consultation process for information infrastructure
projects must be seen as an iterative process that occurs over the lifespan of the project
(Schwalbe, 2007). As such, each consultation process is an opportunity to market the
evolving nature of the product, and sell its continued support. For instance, before
surveying stakeholder opinion regarding how a digital repository may or may not
complement and/or add value to their workflow, we must profile—in the form of a talk,
poster, presentation or other such media—our plans for developing the infrastructure, and
in the first instance how it is constrained first and foremost by the needs of trustworthy
preservation. Later, after having integrated the results, a second consultation will profile an
improved prototype that will again serve to attract (pull) the relevant stakeholders and
encourage (push) them to maintain allegiance to the product.
For this reason, when discussing requirements with content producers, having various
materials prepared for presentation will help them envisage the kinds of service we intend
to prototype. At first, this may include only mock-ups of workflow; later, it might include
actual prototypes for how this workflow operates in the chosen repository architecture (i.e.,
Fedora). When a producer is faced with creating a new course, being able to view a
prototype of how the repository will hold a few years of well-organized legacy course
materials (and the digitized books, video, audio, and images making it up), s/he will see
potential value to their own workflow in re-using digital material as well as providing a
model for inspiration when viewing how successful legacy courses were organized and
conducted.
Profiling developmental plans and prototypes thus serves a three-way purpose. It creates
discussion and interest in their continued support. It also provides a way to illustrate earlier
feedback has been integrated, thus reinforcing the notion that their continued participation
and feedback is important. Additionally, it provides a forum for continuous evaluation. That
is, often their feedback will be operationalized as a series of interim outcome measures.
We’ll discuss this more in the next section. Thus, each and every stage of evaluation (see
below) must be treated as an exercise in marketing and promotion.
The university provides plenty of opportunity for showcasing products. Thus promotion will
not be limited to consultation sessions intended for evaluation. Promotion will also occur
through formal and informal meetings, talks, poster sessions, as well as the publication of
reports, newsletters and blogs (see Ferreira, Rodrigues, Baptista & Saraiva, 2008).
Infrastructure and processes for this are well established at the Open University.

13

Assessing OUDA
Our marketing plan attempts to integrate promotion into the process of developmental
prototyping and evaluation. By promoting the service, we intend to educate and inform
stakeholders of how the repository’s continued development will add value to their unit.
Through this promotion, we also stay tuned into whether our developmental process is
usable and useful.
However, it is its evaluation and assessment that will provide objective measures of its
usability and usefulness to internal stakeholders. For instance, whether the repository
serves to facilitate course production, decrease overall costs (by increasing re-use and/or
decreasing duplication), and increase student and researcher satisfaction. These are
candidate outcomes that we can target as developmental milestones in promoting its long-
term continued service at higher levels of management (see Rubin, 2006), such as
enhancing university reputation and image, and providing a new set of trustworthy access
points that demonstrably decrease the timeframe and overall costs of producing and
managing an online course.
There are two major criteria of success for this digital library developmental phase. As we
mentioned in the introduction, they are:
A. Preservation policy and repository infrastructure
B. Access (usefulness and usability) and content re-use
The first criterion, preservation and its support through robust and trustworthy
infrastructure, was delineated in the planning section above. We will treat it only briefly
again below, in terms of its value to assessing outcomes. The second regards a set of
criteria that must be operationalized with respect to how usable and useful stakeholders,
as future users, perceive the repository in terms of its future value to their workflow. That
is, while this first phase (2 years) should allow time to implement the repository
architecture, it will not be until the next phase that it will be properly populated with content
for actual use. This will first involve amongst other things setting up a cataloguer’s
interface for ingest workflow and quality control processes, deprecating the disparate
legacy containers the content was stored in, and implementing new library processes
around the digital repository. That will involve deeper levels of change in culture from
traditional library collection development to one adapted around content management to
maximize use of existing and emerging internal collections to support users in formal and
informal learning (Mi & Nesta, 2006). That is, adapting it to the realities of the net
generation.
The OUDA evaluation framework: The triptych model
There is a lot of research devoted to the study of digital library evaluation criteria.
Chowdhury and Chowdhury’s (2003) book on digital libraries is a good place to start. One
constant consideration for a university library is to provide for users with special needs
(Kwak & Bae, 2005). Related to this is research by Inskip, Butterworth, and MacFarlane
(2008) that has found that usefulness and usability is highly dependent on the user’s level
of research experience. Thus, while OUDA target audience in the initial phase will be

14

content producers—or faculty and staff within the university, presumably with higher levels
of research experience, our long-term goals include students and to some extent the
general public. Even so, nobody wants to use a difficult system, and the OU does aspire to
Google-level ease and simplicity in its search and retrieval functions (see again Mi &
Nesta, 2006). For instance, one study by Kengeri, Seals, Harley, Reddy, & Fox (1999)
found very few differences between novice and experienced users of digital libraries, and
Theng et al. (2008) even noted that children designed systems incorporating the same
usability features that adults typically desire.
Another set of resources comes from DELOS19
, a “Network of Excellence on Digital
Libraries,” led by Norbert Fuhr. It contains an excellent set of evaluation studies and an
annotated bibliography of articles relevant to the strategic guidance on issues of
usefulness and usability.
More specifically, Fuhr et al. (2007) developed a digital library evaluation framework by
surveying a range of previous evaluation research. Through an analysis of factors, he
summarizes three dimensions important for evaluation, the first being the system and
technology, treated above. The second is data and the collection, or what we are calling
the usefulness of the system. That is, it addresses questions of the quality of content and
its metadata and how well it can be managed and accessed. The third relates broadly to
the kinds of users it targets and their information seeking tendencies and motivations
(“usage”), what we are again calling usability. They have named these dimensions the
“interaction triptych model,” reproduced in Figure 2 below:

Figure
2
Many authors have generated a similar set of abstractions, prior to the studies of Fuhr, et
al. For instance, Borgman (2013) mentions three components, easily mapped onto this
model, that are key to information access: connectivity (how effectively systems deliver
content), content and services (how users interface with content, i.e., usefulness), and
usability (how users interact with a system). Xie (2006) also collected evaluation criteria
identified by users themselves, and categorized these in five ways, not at all dissimilar to
the approach we are using. They are: usability, collection and service quality, system
performance, and user opinions.
This interaction triptych framework will thus serve as the basis for assessing and
evaluating OUDA as a digital repository system. Each of the three axes of evaluation,
performance, usefulness and usability, will serve as an outcome that we will assess by

19
http://www.delos.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=26&Itemid=52

15

operationalizing its parameters for study. An assumption we will develop in our
assessment section is that user satisfaction along these dimensions will increase re-use
and decrease content duplication.
Performance
The most important of these for this first phase is how well the system interacts with the
formats, structures and representations of the digital content it is intended to preserve.
While most of the hardware and server systems fall within in the domain of university IT
services, there is another component left to library services. The TRAC (Trusted
Repositories Audit & Certification) criteria and checklist will serve as our primary outcome
measure for determining the performance of the system when interacting with content.
TRAC is primarily an evaluation tool for determining repository trust (see Steinhart,
Dietrich & Green, 2009; Ross, 2012) for long-term preservation. However, it is broken into
three sections:
A. Organizational Infrastructure (governance, staffing, policy, licensing, and financial
sustainability)
B. Digital Object Management (ingest procedures, preservation storage and access
management)
C. Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, & Security
Sections B and C deal extensively with criteria of hardware and software (Fedora)
implementation (C) and how different types and forms of digital content should be created,
formatted, structured and described for ingestion as a sustainable information package
that can both interact with said software system (B), but is also preserved independent of
any particular system for long-term preservation purposes (see RLG-NARA Digital
Repository Certification Task Force, 2007)20
. While section B also focuses on parts of the
ingest process that will only be relevant to a later stage of OUDA development (e.g., the
development of a cataloguer’s interface), many aspects of its dozens of criteria-points are
relevant to this outcome.
There are other definitions of performance evaluation that, while certainly relevant to
system performance, will fall outside our scope of evaluating outcomes. They mainly deal
with precision and recall factors taken from studies in information retrieval. They, along
with measures of usefulness and usability, were operationalized and studied for their inter-
factorial influence on one another (Tsakonas & Papatheodorou, 2008).
While the specific results of this study fall outside our scope, the way they operationalized
the three axes are relevant to defining how we will measure the outcomes of OUDA.
Below, in Figure 3, we reproduce the edited triptych framework. Beside the axes of
performance, usability, and usefulness, Tsakonas and Papatheoudou list the attributes
they summarize as the most important indicators for measuring each.

20

16

Figure
3
Usefulness
The usefulness of user-content is a reflection of “how users perceive the relevance of a DL
[digital library] with their needs, the width, the breadth, the quality, as well as the validity of
its collection, and the ability to serve their goals” (Fuhr, 2007). There are two methods of
assessing this: user-studies, and user behaviour. User behaviour comprises the
interdisciplinary investigation that involves many applications from cognitive science and
psychology that attempt to assess how different kinds of humans seek information, how
their cognitive states such as processes of motivation, reasoning, intuition, luck and user-
eye and mouse movements play out in their information choices (see Kuhlthau, 1991;
Jeng, 2013). These factors will be relevant only to later phases of OUDA development.
For now, we shall employ user-studies to assess what stakeholders would like to see
OUDA support in terms of their information needs and preferences. For instance, how can
OUDA deliver relevant and reliable content in a format and at a level appropriate to their
needs in producing content for the OU course modules? These needs will again be
assessed in an iterative manner, as mentioned in the marketing section above. That is,
initial studies will determine need and preferences based on the underlying goals of the
preservation repository, and later studies will evaluate whether iterative prototypes spaced
over developmental time (presented in the form of posters, talks and presentations) are
actually progressing in a way that are perceived to actually serve the needs and
preferences they identified. User studies use a variety of techniques such as surveys,
focus groups, questionnaires and online forms (Fuhr, 2007; see also the DELOS
framework).
Usability
Usability is a major field of study in its own right, the output of which far exceeds in
quantity and scope that produced by information science researchers. Entire fields of
study such as information architecture, human-computer interaction, and user-experience
and interaction (UX/UI) maintain a lively community of usability discussion and research.
Web developers and designers are often the most passionate and knowledgeable

17

individuals on issues relating to usability. For instance, the website A List Apart maintains
an excellent set of resources for developers21
and is usually the first to document
innovations such as responsive design in practical ways.
The attributes listed above in the triptych model—ease-of-use, aesthetics, navigation,
terminology, and learnability—do a good job at triangulating what is at issue in usability
studies. The International Standards Organization (ISO) defines usability as “The extent to
which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with
effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use”22
. Usability testing
is often based on principles of iterative design, and its methods of evaluation are various.
For instance, OUDA will employ various methods for designing the interface and its
organizational structure from scratch. This will employ methods such as card-sorting, focus
groups, and surveys. Later, when iterating through actual design prototypes, we will use
methods such as cognitive walkthroughs, and thinking aloud (see Rousseau, Rogers,
Mead et. al., 1998).
An earlier study by Tsakonas and Papatheoudou (2006) found that users prefer a system
that is useful over usable, insofar as its primary goal is to locate content within a system.
However, research by Xie (2006) found usability ranked higher, so one must conclude the
outcome is heavily influenced by methodological artifact. However, the former outcome
corresponds closely with De Rosa et al.’s (2005) study mentioned above. That is, that
users usually only turn to library sites if issue of accuracy and credibility are at stake; that
is, the usefulness of the content. However useful it may be, it is well established (Joint,
2010) that users prefer one-stop aggregated search features over gateway databases and
federated digital libraries, something the librarians still have not come to terms with when
developing digital systems that overwhelm most users with unnecessary metadata filters
and advanced search features they assume specialists prefer. Tsakonas and
Papatheordorou (2008) note that if these kinds of features are developed, their ease of
use is absolutely essential to user satisfaction.
Conclusions
This literature review has attempted to outline many of the most important considerations
when planning, marketing and assessing a digital library repository for the long-term
storage, preservation and dissemination of university online-course material.
Our chief goal for Phase One planning (a two-year plan) is encompassed in the statement
below:

21
http://alistapart.com/topic/usability

22
"ISO/AWI TR 9241-1". International Organization for Standardization.

18

At its core, OUDA will provide a one-stop shop to store and preserve all legacy course
material, and incorporate new course materials, instead of this content being stored in a
slipshod manner across various OU faculties responsible for its production and
presentation (e.g., researchers, lecturers, and course production units).
Most stakeholders are going to want well-defined reasons and evidence outlining what the
long-term benefits are to adopting a digital preservation repository project. This will involve
carefully measured and marketed indicators such as cost reductions, speed and efficiency
increases to organizational workflow, repository effectiveness at improving the overall
quality of its services, as well as how it will enhance the organization’s reputation. These
indicators will need to be operationalized, measured, and evaluated against expectations
based an organization’s strategic mission.
In the planning, marketing and assessment sections that follow, it is our responsibility to
show in concrete ways how OUDA will add to the university’s strategic mission of
increasing educational value to its virtual customer base, and providing researchers and
digital learners with high quality, low-cost and trustworthy content through the use of open
and inter-operable standards, making education easily accessible to all.

Planning OUDA as a preservation repository
Introduction
The Open University Digital Archive (OUDA) is our solution to providing core information
and enterprise content management systems to service the needs of the Open
University’s online educational model and corporate e-business. The planning
documentation below will discuss the business model project plan for OUDA and how it is
to satisfy both library and university strategic planning.
OUDA is in Phase One of planning. Phase One is a two-year plan. This first phase
describes the implementation details for a developmental prototype of a digital repository
to archive and preserve university generated content. Its plan for development is in
response to increasing demand from Open University (OU) stakeholders to provision
content management services for university-generated material that requires long-term
sustainable access and preservation management.
Relationship to library strategic planning
Purpose
The vision of OUDA aims to enhance the visibility and academic reputation of the Open
University (OU) by preserving selected Open University historical, learning, teaching, and
research content. Exposing this learning and research material will demonstrate the quality
and increase the usefulness of OU’s pedagogical methods and illustrate how they have
developed over time.
Because these resources have been expensive to produce, there is a growing demand
from faculty, academic researchers, university content producers, and library archival
services to address the long-term sustainable management of this growing corpus of
legacy material. For this reason, OUDA will operate as an important repository for the
preservation, discovery and re-use of OU resources. The development plan of OUDA must
encompass digital preservation policy, provisioning for digital services, content licensing
and rights, as well as the technical and infrastructure requirements in relation to preserving
and managing access across stakeholder groups to legacy content and materials.

20

The strategic context
As a world-leader in distance learning the Open University has moved rapidly into the
world of digital content. Our reputation as a university is built on our digital content
services. Many millions of pounds are invested yearly in creating digital content and digital
services to deliver innovative and effective learning.
OUDA will be a space where collections of material from the OU’s rich history can be
discovered and preserved. As a ‘digital university’ we need to be taking steps now to
preserve the best of the OU’s digital material. If we do not act now material will continue to
decay or be lost.
OUDA will be developed in alignment with the OU’s mission and core value statements. Its
values are inclusivity, innovation, and responsiveness23
. Library Services strategic
priorities (2010-2014) have been developed in accordance with these values. In regards to
OUDA, the most relevant of these strategic priorities is to:
• Focus direction on the virtual customer base ensuring that resources, systems and
processes are developed in line with the distributed and in future global nature of
this complex and fragmented customer base.
• Support researchers in exploiting their use of their own content and facilitate their
access to other quality research resources and networks.
• Provide stewardship and strategic advocacy for sustainable digital preservation of
teaching materials and research data management services for long-term access
and reuse.
Broadly envisioned, OU Library Services have developed a set of strategies nested within
the broader OU strategic framework. The following OU Focus Area Objectives have been
identified as an indispensible set of objectives that OUDA must meet if it is also to meet
the goals of university and library strategic planning. These are:
Focus Area 2: Learning and teaching efficiency
To improve upon the efficiency of course production, presentation and assessment
in order to reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of the core business
Focus Area 3: Developing pedagogy
Continue to innovate and develop pedagogy to maintain and enhance the OU’s
reputation for quality innovative teaching and learning
Focus Area 5: Research and scholarship
The improved promotion, dissemination and impact of OU research and
scholarship, and its integration with course production, presentation and
assessment

23
http://www.open.ac.uk/about/main/files/aboutmain/file/ecms/web-content/strategic-plan-2012-15.pdf

21

Focus Area 6: Business efficiency
Financial sustainability through the delivery of good value by facilitating university-
produced content discovery, decreasing course material duplication, and increasing
its re-use, thus leading to a greater return on investment and helping to save
production costs
Relevant Literature
One of the most important results of the research we reviewed was the establishment of
the TRAC (Trusted Repositories Audit and Certification24
) standard, developed by the
NLG-NARA Digital Repository certification Task Force (2007). It serves as an authoritative
checklist of the necessary evidence required to demonstrate long-term repository viability.
Its three sections, which will constitute a principle primary outcome measure of repository
trust (see Steinhart, Dietrich & Green, 2009; Ross, 2012) for long-term preservation, are:
A. Organizational Infrastructure (governance, staffing, policy, licensing, and financial
sustainability)
B. Digital Object Management (ingest procedures, preservation storage and access
management)
C. Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, & Security
Fedora was chosen as our repository software system. Fedora conforms to the Research
Libraries Group (2002) definition of digital preservation. It 1) ensures the “long term
maintenance of a byte stream (including metadata) sufficient to reproduce a suitable
facsimile of the original document”, and 2) allows for “the continued accessibility of the
document contents through time and changing technology.”
The analysis of repository software published by the London School of Economics and
Political Science (LSE) guided our decision to select Fedora (Fay, 2010). Fedora is
flexible, extensible, and modular. This allows for add-on software independence, and the
digital objects are also stored independent of the repository itself, critical for preservation
purposes. Fedora, in contrast to DSpace and EPrints, also allows for complex object
types, persistent identifier schemas, bitstream preservation tools, customizable ingest
workflows, and RDF relationship data and search capabilities.
However, correct software configuration is not enough to ensure long-term preservation
(Wilczek & Glick, 2006). We must ensure preservation is part and parcel of long-term
university and library strategic planning. That is, while preservation is the goal, OUDA is
also being developed in alignment with the OU’s mission and core value statements
outlined above. That is, the repository should also create value insofar as it addresses the
four OU Focus Statements above. That is, it should 1) make teaching and learning more
efficient, 2) innovate pedagogy to increase OU’s reputation, 3) promote OU’s research
impact, and 3) increase business efficiency in the production of course materials (and
hence decrease costs).
Long-term preservation requires good policy, which integrates people, applications,
procedures, workflow plans, institutional and technical support, and correctly configured

24

22

applications and infrastructure. From the literature review above, we outlined useful
considerations for a strong policy framework (see Beagrie, Semple, Williams et al., 2008;
Seamus, 2012). They are:
• Organizational viability: How will preservation serve organizational need, and who
are its stakeholders?
• How will it be integrated into and how does it relate to other organizational strategic
priorities?
• What are the objectives of preservation and how will these be supported?
• Has the content it will potentially store been defined and delimited? What kinds of
collections will it store?
• Who is procedurally accountable to these policies and what are their obligations?
• Who is financially and organizationally responsible for sustaining the repository?
We also reviewed particular lower-level implementation clauses that should be articulated
within policy documentation. Most of these are covered in the TRAC checklist. They
include (adapted from Kenney & Buckley, 2005):
• Costs and long-term funding arrangements for maintaining the repository
• Staffing roles and responsibilities (organizational and technical expertise)
• Submission guidelines (who can ingest what, and the criteria for its selection)
• Descriptions of the collection and the objects it will contain
• Object format guidelines
• Authentication mechanisms (to track users and object submission)
• Procedures for content quality and information package quality control
• Object persistence and validation procedures (e.g., checksum identity)
• Metadata policies (including preservation actions and events)
• Procedures and policies for clearing intellectual rights
• Storage, duplication and backup
• System inter-operability, security, and data sharing policies
Collier (2010) has published an edited book on business planning in digital libraries,
something he sees as rather neglected relative to technical and metadata development.
He defines this in the following way:
Business planning for digital libraries is here defined as the process by which the
business aims, products and services of the eventual system are identified, together
with how the digital library service will contribute to the overall business and mission
of the host organizations. These provide the context and rationale, which is then
combined with normal business plan elements such as technical solution,
investment, income expenditure, projected benefits or returns, marketing, risk
analysis, management and governance.
Thus, having full library and university cooperation and business support for a digital
library’s long-term technical, financial, managerial, and administrative sustenance is
essential. To do so, we must first know who these stakeholders are.

23

Stakeholder and user needs analysis
The development of OUDA must be first and foremost customer focused. The customer in
the case of OUDA includes a wide range of stakeholders. We define the following three
groups of stakeholders, and will identify and describe these each in turn:
1) OU Library Stakeholders (internal)
2) University Unit Stakeholders (external)
3) Students and Public Stakeholders (external)
It is these stakeholders that in the first instance also represent our user base. That is, all of
these stakeholders represent potential users, with their own set of needs from which they
can benefit depending on the impact the service is expected to have on these needs.
Thus, within each of the stakeholder/user sections that follow, we will outline the various
kinds of need each of these stakeholder/user groups describe as important to fulfilling their
own strategic goals of satisfying university mission and the informal or formal means by
which these have been assessed and/or observed.
In the same respect, we will also provide a brief analysis of the associated set of risks and
costs of service implementation (or non-completion of its stated goals), as well as the level
of demand we should expect from each of these groups given the benefits and impact the
service is expected to have on their interests.
STELLAR Project: Preliminary stakeholder views assessed
Before identifying and analysing our stakeholder groups, however, it is worth reporting the
results of a relevant study that addressed how semantic technologies might enhance the
lifecycle of learning resources. The study also addressed the value of legacy learning
materials no longer in presentation to students.
The eighteen-month JISC funded STELLAR project (non-published, 2013) run by OU
Library Services surveyed (online) the perception of stakeholders (n=561), which included
asset creators (academic and non-academic), senior administrators, asset managers, and
regular internal users (not including students). Follow up interviews were conducted with
approximately 10% of each stakeholder strata (including six senior stakeholders). The
survey used the “balanced scorecard approach”25
.
While the results themselves are quite nuanced, a few outstanding tendencies were
observed. For instance, 89% agreed or strongly agreed that the maintenance of an archive
of non-current OU material is important to OU reputation, with merely 2.3% disagreeing,
and 75.9% believing it should be maintain in perpetuity. 90% of respondents agreed or
strongly agreed that non-current learning materials are important to the context of higher
education history, and 91% of those involved in course module production agreed or
strongly agreed that they were likely to look to previous material for inspiration or re-use
when producing new OU learning material.
The study concluded that OU stakeholders place high value on legacy learning materials,
whether that mean personally and/or professionally, financially, or as having value to

25
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_scorecard

24

higher education and/or the internal processes and cultures involved in their production.
This supports the belief that these materials should be preserved, and that doing so will
enhance OU reputation, underscore its history and that of higher education in general,
provide academics and students more opportunity to utilise this rich set of resources, and
facilitate their re-use in course production.
OU Library stakeholders
Based on internal feedback and observations from library staff, one main gap in the
portfolio of services is the provision for long-term preservation. In the planning section in
literature review above, we outlined how preservation policy must be linked to core library
strategy.
Recent decisions have determined that our current cataloguing system, ExLibris’ Voyager
Integrated Library System, no longer serves the needs of the library or university for the
maintenance of the various kinds of legacy digitized and digital-borne multi-media that
require long-term storage preservation. Nor does it allow for the effective structuring and
description of these digital objects through the use of modern metadata and relational data
standards that enable extensible, modular, and inter-operable access to these objects
across various web platforms and web service models.
Additionally, a number of projects (e.g., Videofinder26
) have been funded to build websites
and resource collections without the requirement to develop a sustainability plan and
budget to maintain access to these collections beyond the life of the projects themselves.
Alongside the remit of OU Library Services to archive these materials, there is potential for
reuse of these rich resources in learning, teaching and research. Thus, a service that
brings together the OU Library’s digital collections from these disparate sources will be
welcomed.
The changing role of Library Services involves shifting from being providers of print
services to focusing our services entirely on the digital. Additionally, we must start looking
beyond the management of licenced resources from external venders into a future in
which open resources play a more critical role. It is thus essential that university-created
resources be exploited for longer periods of time and be made more widely available.
The following chart illustrates the set of internal library stakeholders and their respective
stake and set of expectations they hold for the project as well as the potential impact they
will have on the project’s success.
Role Stake / interest / expectations Potential
Impact
Library Director
Nicky Whitsed (NW)
Programme and Project Sponsor. That OUDA delivers a
convincing prototype for a digital library service, and can
increase the value of the library service model.
High

26
http://videofinder.open.ac.uk/ commissioned by Library Services to hold video and audio assets developed across the
university for use in course modules or as co-productions with the BBC programme services. Internal (non-public) use
only, the system is now operated by the OU Open Media Unit (OMU)

25

Associate Director
(Information Management
and Innovation)
Gill Needham (GN)
Steering Group member and executive accountable for
business case, project benefits and outcomes. To ensure
resources are sufficiently available for project success. That
OUDA delivers a convincing prototype and increases the value
of a digital library service. That the project is promoted across
university units (see external stakeholders).
High
OUDA Programme
Manager (RN)
That the project delivers on its aims and objectives as a service
model. That the project is sustainable, scalable, and is
developed in line with its stated strategic objectives. That the
project is promoted across university units (see external
stakeholders).
High
OUDA Project Manager
(LM)
That the project team delivers and meet project aims and
objectives according to stakeholder requirements. Scheduling,
reporting, keeping the project on track. That the project is
promoted across university units (see external stakeholders).
High
OUDA Systems Developer
(JA)
That the technical infrastructure will incorporate appropriate
standards and tools, meet user requirements, and be
documented.
High
OU Archivist (RC) That OUDA is build to appropriate international preservation
standards (e.g., TRAC and DRAMBORA) and offers a
sustainable solution for OU archives and teaching materials.
High
OU Metadata Development
Manager (LW)
That OUDA is built to appropriate international metadata
standards, is developed using linked data principles, and allows
for easy access to OU archives and teaching materials.
High
Library Academic and
Student Support Leader
That users needs are met, and champions support within OU
division of academic and student services.
Medium
Library IT team Technical advice when needed. Support with OU IT Services. Medium
Library IM team Some aspects of content preparation and migration. Quality
control checking. Some aspects of standards and policy work.
Medium
Other library staff That OUDA will allow access to more content and better
services.
Low
University stakeholders
The following chart illustrates the set of external (outside the library) stakeholders within
the Open University. This group of stakeholders will primarily provide advice and
consultation services in order to inform aspects of OUDA project development.
In the third column of the table that follows, we briefly outline what we view to be the
potential need and/or interest the stakeholder might have in establishing OUDA as an
institutional repository. These have only been assessed informally, through observation,
internal question and answer sessions, and feedback and focus group sessions held over
the past year of system prospecting.
In the fourth column, we assess the potential impact that the completion of this project will
have on the respective unit’s workflow and its contribution towards university strategic
goals.

26

Role Stake / interest Potential need / benefit Potential
Impact
Pro-Vice Chancellor
of Learning and
Teaching
(PVC-LTQ)
Professor Belinda
Tynan
Funding and university project
sponsor. University learning and
teaching strategy and
governance, responsible for:
• Learning and Teaching
Solutions (LTS)
• Library Services
• Open Media Unit (OMU)
Value added to university
workflow. Enhanced university
image and reputation across the
UK and the world. A historical
timeline of university content
preserved over the long-term,
reduces risk of content loss. Saves
money.
High
LTS (Learning and
Teaching Services)
Publishing services. Supports
the development, production,
and delivery of distance learning
materials.
Course module re-use and non-
duplication. Integration with VLE
(Moodle) and course development
workflow. A single e-production
system.
High
OMU (The Open
Media Unit)
Managing the production of
OpenLearn, YouTube, iTunes
and BBC output to support the
OU’s social and business
mission.
Searchable audio-video system
record to replace Videofinder and
expose content. BBC and iTunes
content can appear in OUDA, and
vice-versa. Linking content
between data silos.
High
KMi (Knowledge
Media Institute)
Supports linked data and
semantic web technologies.
Including our RDF namespaces:
www.data.open.ac.uk.
Little value to KMi. But continued
KMi development of linked data
minting and mining highly
important to semantic sharing.
Low
OU Central
Academic Units
Academic units responsible for
writing, teaching, and course
delivery.
Easy reference/access to legacy
courses and how they were
presented. Exemplars of good
practice. Academic reputation. It
fosters non-duplication and re-use
in teaching materials.
Medium
OU Information
Technology
Server infrastructure for OUDA.
Long-term digital storage.
Closer to becoming single system;
inter-operability.
Low
Students and public stakeholders
The following chart illustrates the set of external (outside the library) stakeholders from
beyond the borders of the Open University. This group of stakeholders will provide mostly
advice and consultation services in order to inform aspects of OUDA project development.
Noteworthy here is the stake existing professional communities will have and how their
interest and expertise in issues of higher education, preservation, and linked data will play
a part in the development of OUDA. For more information regarding these professional
user communities, especially those of preservation and linked data, please re-visit the
literature review at the beginning of this report.

27

Role Stake / interest Potential need / benefit Potential
Impact
OU Students Potential future users of
OUDA. Prospective and
current students can taste OU
course history. Past students
can access old course
material.
Access to a preserved record of past
course module material. A better,
more integrated online experience.
For prospective students, especially,
evidence of how OU online study
works.
Low
Wider HE and
library community
(academics and
staff/students from
other institutions)
Potential future users of
OUDA. Publicity and support.
We will seek constructive feedback
from these potential future users.
Low
Linked data
community (when
data is exposed in
RDF format)
Potential future sharers of
OUDA linked data content.
from these potential future users, as
well as advice and guidance in
implementation.
Medium
Digital preservation
an curation
communities
Interest in what we are doing.
Publicity and support.
from these potential future users, as
well as advice and guidance in
implementation.
Medium
General public May eventually want to use
OU resources for free.
None at present. Low
Stakeholder benefits, costs and risks
General benefits
• There will be a location to show non-current digital material from the OU, to allow
the Open University to preserve and present the OU’s ‘digital heritage’, ‘institutional
memory’ and ‘student experience’
• For the first-time it will be possible to show the full content of an historical module in
digital form to staff
• It will be much easier to search and access digital content from the OU’s archives
collections
• Collections of material such as images will be much more discoverable and visible
• There will be the potential to use the linked data elements of OUDA to link to and
from other content
• The University Archive will become a much more visible service
• There will be a digital preservation service, making it clear to stakeholders how they
can go about ensuring that their content can be preserved.

28

• OUDA will support linked data as part of routine activities, using this technology
within Fedora (with an RDF triple-store) and as a tool to display content from other
SPARQL endpoints (e.g. from data.open.ac.uk)
Costs and risks
For this reason, library stakeholders have established a case to justify the need for this
digital repository. Certain types of content are at risk if no plan is put in place for continued
management. This includes the OU’s born-digital and digitised teaching output and assets.
That is, the risk of not implementing some plan to develop a digital repository to store and
preserve this content is now reaching a critical point. Non-action is not an option.
Additionally, the pace of university e-content development is outstripping the library’s
capacity for its effective organisation for future accession. This is true especially given the
quickly changing business model in higher education. A digital repository that is flexible,
extensible, modular, open and agile is essential to support a university’s e-portfolio
development and maturity in an increasingly competitive industry based on ever-
quickening changes in software and web systems.
There are various costs associated with developing this repository. The main one being a
re-structuring of library processes to accommodate this new model. Service delivery may
suffer during development, as will the replacement and retraining of staff to accommodate
the new service delivery structures and procedures.
The external group of stakeholders, with the exception of PVC-LTQ, may potentially view
OUDA as a threat to their existing services. Care must be taken to convince these groups
as part of our marketing and communication plans that OUDA will seek to complement
their existing digital architectures and services, not replace or disrupt them.
One additional risk is that this complicates the workflow processes of other units, insofar
as it is not adopted wholesale for digital preservation of non-current course materials, but
instead becomes just another option amongst many for where these materials end up.
Demand and impact
We estimate high demand from internal library users. Currently, the fragmented and short-
term approach to digital storage creates large amounts of frustration in staff. With too
many overlapping local systems, each one replacing the next as software changes,
content resides across various “silos” each requiring a different set of work processes for
its discovery, access and retrieval. It is non-persistent and without common policy for its
long-term preservation. Establishing these kinds of changes will have high impact for
library users with a stake in digital content systems, including metadata librarians,
archivists, digital project managers, systems developers, cataloguers, and academic and
research support specialists.
We estimate high demand from most external stakeholders, with the proviso that the risks
associated above (and the limitations delineated below) are managed and controlled. The
usefulness and the usability of the service architecture must also be very high it the
repository is to be utilised across university units. This will ensure that the repository is

29

trustworthy, clearly and capably administered, accessible, and complies with its stated
intentions in user-friendly ways.
Recommendations for action
Focus on the customer. Focus OUDL services and solutions on the needs of core
customer groups: currently registered OU students, teaching staff, ALs and research staff.
Convene a LTQ Digital Libraries Development Working group with cross-university
representation to secure broader OU stakeholder involvement and engagement to drive
OUDA forward.
Engage the OU community with OUDA proposals to ensure they meet expectations and
service requirements, for guaranteed levels of high quality, trusted and sustainable
services and resources.
Capitalize on existing semantic web technology expertise resident in KMI to prototype and
test scalability and adoption of the OUDA framework, standards and technologies.
Work closely with the LTS e-production staff to deliver potential business efficiency
savings associated with OUDA, ensuring scalability and robustness of OUDA in particular
relating to implementing sustainable good practice in information, digital asset and
metadata management.
Benchmark the OUDA framework and systems strategy against world-class digital libraries
currently in service. In particular, the China Academic Digital Library Information System
(CADLIS) model now serving 1800 universities across China.27
Our chief goal for Phase One planning, marketing and assessing this prototype is
encompassed in the statement below:
The Open University Digital Archive (OUDA) has the following goals:

27
Wenqing, Wang and Ling, Chen (2010) Building the new generation China Academic Digital Library Information
System (CADLIS): A Review and Prospectus. DLib Magazine, May/June, Vol 16, No 5/6
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may10/wenqing/05wenqing.html

30

• Capture OU history, learning, teaching and research materials to enable their
preservation, discovery and reuse, inform pedagogical decisions and facilitate
educational research.
• Complement existing platforms (such as OpenLearn, iTunesU and Study at the OU)
to support students’ informal to formal learning. Where assets already appear online
OUDA will drive traffic to the relevant platform for access through the use of
semantic technology, whilst aiming to preserve a high quality copy and associated
metadata in OUDL for the long-term.
• Contain a selection of fully-searchable digitised and ‘born digital’ OU materials from
videos and images to digitised documents; thus providing access to archive
materials previously only accessible by visiting the OU Archive, and supporting the
enquirer and study experience.
• Manage and preserve digital content in a long-term, sustainable manner in
accordance with OU policy and international preservation and metadata standards.
The following are the six outcomes according to which we will measure the success of
OUDA (see the assessment section) after this initial phase one of planning:
1) A preservations policy plan is in place and has been approved by the OUDA
Steering Group. This preservation policy plan will contain all of the elements
described in the literature reviews above, and will be benchmarked against other
successful institutional policy directives.
2) OUDA will comply with the components of the TRAC audit that fall within the scope
of Phase 1 planning. That is, TRAC Sections A (Organizational Infrastructure) and
C (Technologies, Technical Infrastructure, and Security). Section B contains
elements of cataloguing ingest workflows, and will belong to Phase 2.
3) OUDA will contain prototypes of various content types. This will include complete
records and content of course material (i.e., video, audio, texts, supplementary
materials, books) for at least 3 non-current online legacy courses. This material will
cohere as part of a course, but also as materials that cohere as collections in
themselves (e.g., a collection of BBC videos, each video which is also “part of” one
or more course modules, or not).
4) The OU Archive study material records (metadata) are discoverable via OUDA.
They allow for effective searching, browsing and faceted filtering to discover content
and content types. That is, the content becomes useful to a user insofar as it is
relevant, in a readable format, reliably discoverable, and is at the correct level and
coverage specified.
5) OUDA can be used to guide people towards content related to their search on other
platforms such as iTunes-U and OpenLearn using linked data functionality. That is,
it will have linked data functionality through a SPARQL endpoint and interact with
the URIs minted for course materials at data.open.ac.uk.
6) OUDA has incorporated feedback from its most relevant external stakeholder
groups. That is, the OUDA prototype has received positive feedback from

31

stakeholders across groups regarding its potential ROI for increasing course
material re-use and course production productivity. And its potential value and utility
for enhancing OU’s academic and research reputation.
Long-term outcomes that fall outside of the scope of Phase 1 planning are as follows.
OUDA success also hinges on its ability to transition to Phase 1 goals and outcomes.
Some of these include the following:
• The OU Archive is able to use the OUDA as their main cataloguing environment for
study materials.
• OUDA is the main interface for digital preservation workflows and processes.
• Library management is able to use usage reports generated by OUDA to make
informed business decisions.
• Archive staff is able to use preservation reports generated by OUDA to make
preservation decisions.
• The OU Archive is able to offer a digitise-on-demand service for video and audio
content to staff through OUDA.
• The OU Archive is able to offer a service to OU staff to preserve and make
accessible their digital content, if it meets selection criteria.
• OUDA is used to promote the OU Archive, Library Services and the OU itself to the
wider public.
Responsible parties
Internal OU Library Services has developed a hierarchy of responsible parties that is
structured all the way up to the Director of Library Services, Nicky Whitsed (NW). She
chairs the steering group of internal library stakeholders that formalize all decision-making
processes undertaken by the library as a university unit. The steering group is made up of
representatives of the three major library sub-units: 1) Academic and Student Services, 2)
Business Performance and Management, and 3) Information Management and Innovation.
The first sub-unit (1) ensures that the project is well represented across academic and
student services. It ensures the library is working closely with course module production
teams and the various faculty branches that make up the academic heart of the university.
The second sub-unit (2) addresses various system support issues that occur within the
library. While OU IT Services hosts OUDA infrastructure, the library has a small technical
team that provides back-up expertise and support to the OUDA development team.
The stakeholders above hold administrative authority over the project and will serve to
guide its strategy and vision for implementation. Their role will be mostly informative.

32

The third (3) sub-unit is responsible for governing the OUDA digital library project itself,
and is headed by Gil Needham, its associate director. Responsible to her is the Digital
Libraries Programme Manager, Richard Nurse (RN), and the Library Services Manager,
Liz Mallett (LM). His team is responsible for systems, services, and infrastructure
development, hers for content provisioning, preservation management, and metadata
development.
A diagram (see Figure 4) of this organization can be seen below:

Figure
4
The project team is responsible for the day-to-day implementation of the OUDA digital
repository. The overall rationale for staffing OUDA is that the service should be pitched at
a sustainable level and should be based, as far as is possible, around existing levels of
staff. In most cases these can be accommodated by small changes in roles and job
description. We recommend that OUDA staff be made up of the following individual roles
and responsibilities.
Role Responsibility & Skills Required Responsible
to
Resource
time on
OUDA
Existing role
OUDA Project
Manager (AG)
Project management. Stakeholder,
communication and risk planning.
Deliverable and GANTT
scheduling. Budget and financing.
Reporting.
RN 0.5 FTE Project
manager for a
retired OU
project.
Open University
Archivist (RC)
Preservation strategy and policy.
Content and material provisioning
and supply. Digitization initiatives.
Archival expertise.
LM 0.5 FTE University
Archivist
Archive and
digitization
LM & RC 0.25 FTE (x2) Archive
assistants
Sponsor
NW
(Library Director)
Project
Governance
Library Leadership
Team

Accountable
Executive
GN
(Associate Director)
Reference
Group
External Stakeholders
(OU)
OUDA
Programme

Manager
RN
Project
Team

(Project
Manager:
AG)

Steering
Group
Internal Library
Stakeholders
OUDA
Content

Manager
LM

33

assistants (x2)
Systems
Administrator
Responsible for operations of
OUDA infrastructure and providing
basic frontline server/IT support.
RN 0.1 FTE IT Services.
Current
systems
librarian.
OUDA Digital
Repository Web
Developer (JA)
Infrastructure lead. Technical and
web development. Linked data
implementation. Interface
development. Data ingestion.
RN 1.0 FTE Currently a
temporary
post, to be
permanent.
Content and
Access Manager
(KB)
User experience/needs testing.
Content accessibility. Usability &
usefulness. Front-end. Promotion
and advocacy.
RN 0.5 FTE Currently a
digital projects
officer
Metadata
Development
Manager (LW)
Metadata standards and profiling.
Linked data. Classification and
vocabulary standards.
LM .5 FTE University
Metadata
Manager
Metadata
Development
Officer (technical)
Metadata standards and profiling.
Technical liason to Fedora
developer. Technical
documentation. Data
transformations and linked data
implementation.
LM .8 FTE Must create
role.
Advocacy,
promotion
Promoting the use of the digital
library. This role will fall across
various roles above (RN, LM &
KB), and will include OU
GN -- TBS
Action plan and timeline
Phase Scope Activities/Tasks Milestones Duration
(2 years)
1a Project
definition,
scope and
mandate.
Develop governance model
(above), project Steering
Group, and project teams.
Scope documentation.
Steering Group established. Mandate
developed. Project mandate approved
by project sponsor (NW).
2 months
1b Project
planning
High level detailed
planning. Milestones,
GANTT, risk management,
communications
strategy/plan, stakeholder
engagement
Documents:
--Scope
--Risk Strategy
--Communications Plan
--Stakeholder Engagement
Project team assembled
4 months
1c Work
packages
Stage 1:
Project team will begin
development across four
(4) work packages:
WP1—Fedora installed/configured for
digital content type bulk ingestion. Zend
Framework.
8 months

34

--WP1 (infrastructure)
--WP2 (content)
--WP3 (services)
--WP4 (standards/policies)
WP2—Identification, digitization, and
rights clearance of pilot content
WP3—User requirements, stakeholder
feedback assessed, services planning
and costing.
WP4—drawing up preservation policies,
and metadata profiles for digital objects.
1d Work
packages
Project team will begin
integration of work
packages and quality
control related to
stakeholder feedback and
informal assessments from
Steering Group and other
pilot users.
Fedora has ingested pilot content
(WP1), organized according to content-
types and course modules (WP2), and
must be preservation (TRAC) enabled
and metadata conforming (WP4). Front-
end (WP1) must expose content
according to service model expectations
(WP3) relevant to content types (WP2)
and metadata standards (WP4). Linked
data (WP4), front-end usability (WP3),
and rights and permissions clearance
(WP2).
8 months
Promotion,
user
feedback,
and
advocacy
Project advocacy and
feedback reports with
external stakeholder
groups.
Completed stages of communications
plan for promotion and feedback.
Using feedback from user groups for
Iterative quality control.
Front-end planning (WP1, WP3)
completed based on usability/usefulness
feedback.
1e Phase 1
closure
Assessment and project
(Phase 1) closure
Final (Phase 1) assessments complete.
Achievement of the desired end-state
(as per our planned goals and outcome
statements)
Lessons learned.
Stakeholder feedback and promotion.
Soft launch of OUDA prototype (to
specified stakeholder groups only)
2 months
Preliminary communications plan
Theme Objective Key message Relevant
Stakeholder
Digital
Preservation
We are preserving
content to ensure
legal compliance,
Protects investment as OUDA will enable re-
use and non-duplication of existing assets.
LTS, PVCs, Deans
and Assistant Deans,
library staff.

35

business continuity
and maintenance of
scholarly record.
Ensures asset authenticity, accuracy, and
completeness.
Ensures business continuity and helps
identify long-term trends
Ensures scholarly and cultural record
preserved as digital courseware objects
Open
Standards
Open software and
standards to lower
costs and increase
ROI
Open standards lower costs and increase
returns on investment by promoting:
Inter-operability
Vender neutrality
Efficient use of existing resources
Greater automatation
Flexibility and modularity
Robustness, durability, and sustainability
More options to optimize
Lower manageable risk
Quality
Increases staff skills
IT, KMi, LTS
Content Initially, OUDA will
contain pilot
content
A selection of digital and digitised archival
content.
Legacy course materials and their
component courseware items (videos, audio,
books, PDFs, images, etc.)
Various historical collections from OU
All stakeholders
Services Easy and open
internal
accessibility
We will develop a suite of digital library
services that will allow for OU staff and
administrators to access the repository.
All stakeholders
Linked Data Combing data
across silos
OUDA will employ RDF and linked data
technology to ensure the content can be
linked to and from internal and external
systems (through a SPARQL endpoint).
KMi, Comms (online
services), library
staff, OMU
Technical
Architecture
Flexible and low
cost system that
enables large scale
preservation
activities
Fedora Commons is open source repository
software for managing, preserving, and
linking digital content. It is flexible, modular,
scales to millions of objects, provides RDF
search, has RESTful APIs, and disaster
recovery utilities.
IT, KMi
Videofinder OUDA will provide
a sustainable
replacement for
Videofinder, a remit
of OMU
Videofinder is a non-sustainable system to
hold selected BBC content. With OUDA, the
BBC content will be preserved and related as
courseware to the module records it was
originally produced for. It will expose this OU
content to the world and support informal and
formal learning opportunities from it.
OMU
Documentum OUDA will
complement
Documentum.
OUDA is not competing with Documentum.
Documentum is the OU’s document
management service.
LTS, Rights and all
stakeholders

36

Forecast budget for OUDA
Staff Expenditures
Staff Member Days per
month
(approx.)
£ Monthly
(approx.)
# Months
active
Phase
active
£ Total
(approx.)
OUDA Programme Manager
(RN)
4 800 24 1a-1e 19,200
OUDA Content Manager (LW) 4 800 24 1a-1e 19,200
OUDA Project Manager (AG) 7 1,500 24 1a-1e 36,000
Open University Archivist
(RC)
7 1,500 24 1a-1e 36,000
Archive / digitization
assistants (x2)
7 (3.5 x 2) 750 18 1c-1e 13,500
Systems Administrator 1 200 18 1c-1e 3,600
OUDA Digital Repository Web
Developer (JA)
18 3,500 18 1c-1e 63,000
Content and Access Manager
(KB)
7 1,500 18 1c-1e 27,000
Metadata Development
Manager (LW)
7 1,500 18 1c-1e 27,000
Metadata Development
Officer (technical)
7 1,000 18 1c-1e 36,000
Advocacy, promotion 4 (average) 500 18 1c-1e 9,000
Sub-Totals 13,550 £ 271,500
Non-Staff Expenditures
Item £ Cost
Digitization, rights assessment, and clearance costs 18,000
Front-end designer (sub-contracted) 5,000
IT Computer equipment costs 45,000
Advocacy and promotional events/materials 1,000
DOI (Digital object identifier) costs 3,000
Sub-Totals £ 72,000
Grand Totals (approx.) £ 343,500

37

Pilot testing and scalability
There will not be any pilot testing of OUDA per se. Given that this is in the first instance a
software development project, we will use an iterative and incremental approach to pilot
testing the software evolution. Team members work in close proximity (the same OU
Library Services building) and will engage in constant cross-functional, self-organizing and
adaptive meetings and scheduling. All team members will participate continuously in
software testing and quality control. There will be a minimum amount of usability testing for
web accessibility standards, and this will involve a lot of cross-browser functionality testing
and usable interface design prototyping. It will also involve ensuring content and metadata
is exposed at the right levels and ensuring its discoverability via facets, well-placed blocks,
breadcrumbs for re-traceability, precision granularity of search functions, and through
exposing related content (e.g., OpenLearn) through linked data similarity.
As part and process of the marketing plan (see below), we will find natural breakpoints to
“pilot test” promotional prototypes of its forecast look, feel, form and function. During
Phase 1, this will unlikely involve interaction with the software system itself. Instead, it will
involve drawing up posters, presentations, and mock-up prototyping based on its evolving
mission. These prototypes will serve simultaneously as promotional material as they will
material from which feedback from relevant stakeholder groups will be collected and
assessed. This, as described in the main literature review, will be iterative, and will sustain
and increases stakeholder attention when they witness proposed amendments being
integrated into follow-up prototyping sessions.
There are very few issues of scalability with regards to project size, except insofar as
technical infrastructure scalability is concerned. Fedora scales to millions of digital objects,
and the OU Information Technology unit can easily accommodate OUDA on load balanced
and mirrored servers with many thousands of terabyte capacity.
OUDA itself is itself a prototype that will only be launched “softly” to a select group of
internal stakeholders after Phase One development is complete. For the most part, its
development can only be scaled up. Its scope specifies a minimum level of infrastructure
and resources for its development. Its Phase One development will include a minimum
level of course module (three, out of hundreds), but for completion must include various
kinds of materials (video, audio, books etc.) and its associated metadata. The plan is that
OUDA will be scaled up to also include non-course material such as digital library image
collections.

Planning, Marketing and Assessing a Digital Library:The Open University Digital Archive (OUDA)

Planning, Marketing and Assessing a Digital Library:The Open University Digital Archive (OUDA)

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