Long-term access to digital content is an essential component of stewardship; however, digital content can be susceptible to loss, corruption, and obsolescence. In collaboration with digital content stakeholders across the university, the Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI) has been developing a strategy for institution-wide life cycle management of digital content that includes preservation. This strategy is as much about policy as it is about technology.

In May 2010, a Digital Preservation Planning Committee (DPPC), sponsored by ODAI, was formed and consists of participants from the libraries, museums, and archives. Their charge is to act as an advisory group for projects and systems development within the Yale Digital Commons (YDC) -- a coalition of Yale departments with stewardship responsibilities for collections -- as they pertain to digital preservation. The DPPC members worked together to build a matrix of digital preservation actions and requirements and then developed a “service levels framework” which will be the basis for the development of requirements across the participating organizations.

Technical Approach

ODAI has developed a Digital Preservation Hybrid model as a technical solution to leverage Yale’s Media Management Environment (DAM) in conjunction with a metadata repository to store essential preservation information. The hybrid model provides a modular approach that anticipates extending digital preservation services to digital content, such as research outputs, not suited for the Media Management Environment.

In 2011 ODAI successfully completed the Digital Preservation Hybrid Demonstration project. This project affirmed that the hybrid approach performs well and is viable model for enterprise digital preservation. The project paired the Fedora open source digital repository with the DAM because it provides a robust set of tools for managing the large amount of XML-formatted descriptive and administrative metadata and related content models required to implement digital preservation standards developed within the cultural heritage community. In the final analysis, Fedora performed well but its use added computational overhead and complexity to the system while not taking advantage of Fedora’s richer feature set. Future design decisions will need to assess which content will be selected for digital preservation and weigh the benefits of using Fedora versus a traditional database for storing preservation metadata.

The decision to abandon a monolithic preservation store in favor of a DAM-Fedora hybrid presents ODAI with the opportunity to create a digital preservation service capable of supporting multiple disparate asset management environments.

Policy and Services

The members of the Advisory Group to the Yale Digital Commons will serve as conduits within their departments to advocate and build connections to support next steps in implementing and using the digital preservation services. The goal is to communicate what the required level of engagement will be on the part of the YDC partners and to move forward their own processes of making collection level policy decisions based upon preservation requirements.

It is important to note that each of these activities requires active participation by stakeholders across the institution. Content producers, collection managers, archivists and librarians, and IT specialists from across the university have roles and responsibilities for developing the policies and implementing the services and infrastructure to support these digital preservation efforts.