CUL Digital Preservation Programme: All Systems Go for Year 3!
June 1st marks the start of another year of Cambridge University Libraries’ five year Digital Preservation Programme. The Programme team has made lots of great progress during Year 2, and I wanted to use this post to highlight a few of these achievements as we move into Year 3.
Year 2 Progress
To start off, the Programme team has delivered services to support the deposit and transfer of born-digital archival materials. Our Deposit Service, which allows the Libraries’ archivists and other collections staff to build new and existing collections, went live in October 2022. Since this time, the team’s focus has shifted to embedding this service into business as usual, which has involved supporting staff with training and documentation as well as tracking service usage to measure uptake. And I’m also thrilled to add that this service is starting to be used by members of the University community to deposit official records in digital formats to the University Archives.
The Transfer Service for transferring data from handheld storage carriers went live in February 2023. Establishing this service entailed setting up our Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device (FRED) as well as researching and testing software for transferring the data, including deciding whether to carry out a logical file transfer or create a disk image. It also involved carrying out other steps in the pre-ingest workflow, including virus checking and checksum creation, and recording any issues encountered with any carriers and/or digital files so this information can be communicated to collections staff. Supplementary materials in digital formats deposited with print theses comprise the first materials to be transferred by this service.
Another strand of setting up the Transfer Service involved engaging with archivists whose collections include handheld storage carriers to prioritise which ones should be transferred first and creating guidance to help archivists identify types of carriers and enrich relevant records in the Archives Management System with more accurate metadata.
For both the Deposit and Transfer services, it’s incredibly satisfying to see the amount of data that’s been deposited or transferred. We’re able to track this progress using data provided by the AWS services used to build these other services and displaying the data on our dashboard.
In parallel to launching the Deposit and Transfer services, the Programme team started to implement the repository and preservation functions. This work has entailed setting up Fedora 6, which uses the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) to store digital objects so they are independent from the repository or digital preservation system application; developing and integrating additional microservices to underpin the preservation of ingested digital objects; enhancing our dashboard to monitor the use of services; and procuring the AWS and Azure storage environments.
Designing the architecture and setting up the infrastructure for these services greatly benefitted from time spent on researching possible solutions to inform whether we could use something that already exists or if we needed to build something bespoke. In addition, members of the Programme team undertook AWS training and certification to develop their expertise and ensure they were using these services correctly and in a way that keeps data safe and secure.
This work wouldn’t have been possible without input and feedback from our colleagues, especially those in the Department of Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Open Research Systems, and Research Data Management. We also continue to benefit from the input of our colleagues and external peers in the digital preservation and archiving communities through our Technical Advisory Group and Born-Bigital Archives Working Group meetings and ad hoc catch ups.
What’s in scope for Year 3
In terms of what’s in scope for the next Programme year, we plan to have production instances of our repository and preservation workflows up and running, with eTheses deposited to the University’s open access repository as the first batch of content ingested.
Work will begin to create a common ingest workflow to mitigate having to create bespoke ingest workflows for different CUL digital collections.
The team has also started to build the Workbench user interface, which will be a web-based area for finding out information about preserved digital objects within collections, carrying out further work to accession and appraise digital objects deposited to archival collections, monitoring live services, and querying the repository.
We look forward to sharing more about our work as we begin Year 3!
