Leveraging Short-term Opportunities to Address Long-term Obligations: A Perspective on Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation Programs

Until now, information retrieval (IR) managers have been absorbed by efforts to increase the amount and quality of scholarly deposits. Other pressing concerns have been to develop the software, standards, and other tools to insure access, exchange, and discovery of the works in the IRs. But building an IR without making plans for technological, organizational, and resourcing sustainability is like building a house on sand. At this particular juncture, there are opportunities to enhance the efforts of both institutional repository implementation and digital preservation program development by bringing together the strengths of each. This paper first explores the developmental paths and intersections of digital preservation and institutional repositories, considers the current status of both, and looks ahead toward the opportunities and challenges inherent in their convergent future. Introduction In pursuing the compelling goals of public access to scholarly output and collective economic action against high subscription prices, the open access community has mobilized organizational support and resources to create important infrastructure to support the exchange of scholarly content, and free it from the sometimes overreaching grasp of journal publishers. From a preservation perspective, however, there are serious questions about whether sponsoring organizations can sustain their commitment to archive the digital content deposited in institutional repositories. At this particular juncture, there are opportunities to enhance the efforts of both institutional repository implementation and digital preservation program development by bringing together the strengths of each. LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 57, No. 2, Fall 2008 (“Institutional Repositories: Current State and Future,” edited by Sarah L. Shreeves and Melissa H. Cragin), pp. 262–279 (c) 2009 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois Leveraging Short-term Opportunities to Address Long-term Obligations: A Perspective on Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation Programs Nancy Y. McGovern and Aprille C. McKay 263 mcgovern/digital preservation programs This paper first explores the developmental paths and intersections of digital preservation and institutional repositories, considers the current status of both, and then looks ahead toward the opportunities and challenges inherent in their convergent future. The movement promoting access to publicly funded research has enjoyed snowballing success over the last several months. In a signal legislative victory, the National Institutes of Health now requires researchers it funds to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central upon their acceptance by a journal (NIH, 2008). Journals’ need for commercial exploitation of the works has been protected by a one-year embargo on the public release of a free version of the works; but the law has helped organize authors to make more favorable intellectual property licenses with publishers. The other chief source of federal science research dollars, the National Science Foundation, has embraced a vision of public access to scientific data, and plans invest in “cyberinfrastructure” to enable the deposit and reuse of data (NSF, 2007). Pressing the NSF to commit to archiving of published research results is currently a focus of the open access community. Other recent open access successes include resolutions of the Harvard Arts and Sciences and Law faculties in the spring of 2008 to require faculty members to allow the university to provide free access to their work online (Guterman, 2008). A similar mandate from the high-energy physics community has produced the SCOAP3 initiative, a consortium of laboratories and universities that have pledged to redirect the funds formerly used to subscribe to physics journals to help convert the field’s journals to open access. (SCOAP3, 2008). All of these efforts to support open access raise pressure on institutions to create institutional repositories (IRs) and place even more urgency on the issue of long-term sustainability of content. Until now, IR managers have been absorbed by efforts to increase the amount and quality of scholarly deposits. Other pressing concerns have been to develop the software, standards, and other tools to insure access, exchange, and discovery of the works in the IRs. But building an IR without making plans for technological, organizational, and resource allocation sustainability is like building a house on sand. Where We Came From This section compares the key characteristics and developmental milestones of institutional repositories and digital preservation programs as background for the discussion. It briefly discusses digital preservation community standards and practice in relation to institutional repositories. Digital Preservation Milestones Through the 1980s and 1990s the advent of personal computers and new technologies such as the Internet and e-mail transformed human com264 library trends/fall 2008 munication and recordkeeping practice. Greater access to computers by more diverse users created an explosion in the amount and variety of digital content. Though there were earlier precedents for preserving digital content dating from the 1960s, the emergence of the digital preservation community can be dated from 1996. In December 1994, recognizing that archivists and librarians had a responsibility to learn how to keep digital materials accessible, the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) created the Task Force on Digital Archiving. The task force, with members drawn from archives, libraries, publishers, scholarly societies, government, and business, issued its final report in 1996, entitled “Preserving Digital Information” (Waters & Garrett, 1996). The work has proven influential, and has helped to define a research agenda for digital preservation for more than a decade. It identified the need for deep infrastructure to support digital archiving, and mapped specific strategic research goals for building it. The cochairs, Don Waters and John Garrett outlined the import of the work: If we are effectively to preserve for future generations the portion of this rapidly expanding corpus of information in digital form that represents our cultural record, we need to understand the costs of doing so and we need to commit ourselves technically, legally, economically and organizationally to the full dimensions of the task. (Waters & Garrett, 1996, 3–4) The development of the Open Archive Information System (OAIS) by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) of NASA, beginning in 1995 was a key step in the construction of the standards infrastructure for digital preservation. (CCSDS, 2002) The ISO standard includes terminology and concepts for describing and comparing archival architectures and operations. It also propounds a “roadmap for the development of related standards,” which includes mechanisms and methods for archival interface, ingest, delivery, identification, search, and retrieval, and a call for a standard for the accreditation of archives. Efforts to develop standards in several of these areas were already well underway, progressing in tandem with OAIS. As the OAIS standard was maturing and gaining acceptance, the Digital Archive Directions (DADs) workshop, held in 1998, targeted the crucial areas of ingest, identification, and certification of archives for attention. Taking up the DADs charge, the Archival Workshop on Ingest, Identification, and Certification Standards (AWIICS) in 1999 built an agenda for the creation of standards to describe and certify digital archives. These efforts resulted in several important projects. First, RLG and OCLC pushed to make progress on one of the goals originally set in Waters and Garrett’s “Preserving Digital Information,” report—to create a definition of a trusted digital repository (TDR) and to outline expectations for 265 mcgovern/digital preservation programs institutions that aimed to preserve digital cultural resources. (RLG-OCLC, 2002). The TDR enumerates characteristics of a sustainable digital repository for large-scale heterogeneous research collections, including: • OAIS compliance • administrative responsibility • organizational viability • financial sustainability • technological and procedural suitability • system security, and • procedural accountability. In addition, the report discussed methods and strategies for certification of TDRs, so that stakeholders (depositors, researchers, funders, etc.) would not need to take a repository’s self-declaration of trustworthiness at face value. Five years later, Trusted Digital Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC), by the RLG-NARA Digital Repository Certification Task Force (2007), and supported by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), delineated a set of metrics against which to measure progress toward “trusted repository” status. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) were developing a tool to identify and manage the risks and uncertainties associated with digital preservation using a selfassessment model. The DRAMBORA toolkit, released in draft in February 2007, guides repository managers through a rigorous self-audit. It helps to document organizational commitment to preservation, the policy and regulatory framework and work processes surrounding preservation activities, and to identify and manage risks to digital content. The German collaborations, nestor and DINI, which were also working on the problem of repository certification and audit, emphasized the importance of coaching repositories toward good practice; providing tiered certifications so that the bar is not set so high for young organizations that their participation is discouraged. (nestor, 2006; DINI, 2003). Realizing that they needed to coordinate their energies and resources, the leaders of four digital preservation organizations (DCC, DPE, nestor, and CRL) convened in Chicago in January of 2007 and crafted “Core Requirements for Digital Archives.” Since then, a new project has carried on work to create an ISO standard against which a full audit and certification of digital repositories can be based. Under the standards development auspices of the CCSDS (which sponsored OAIS), this group aims to create a standard that will allow self-assessment as well as external audit, and that will provide the basis for tool development and best practice guides (Digital Repository Audit, 2008). The standard uses a risk-assessment approach, rather than propounding mandates, so that different repositories can elect the best policies and strategies for their particular circumstances. 266 library trends/fall 2008 In addition, the drafters recognize that best practices are constantly changing, and therefore intend that the standard will use a “continuous quality improvement” model so it can be flexible enough to accommodate changing demands and expectations (Digital Repository Audit, 2008). The PREMIS working group has addressed another important standards piece of the digital preservation infrastructure—defining the metadata necessary to support long-term preservation of digital materials. PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementations Strategies), jointly sponsored by OCLC and RLG, released its 237-page Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata in May 2005. Version 2.0 of the dictionary was released in April 2008 (PREMIS Editorial Committee, 2008). Take-up of this standard has been limited; as of June 2008, only nine repositories are listed on the implementation registry, though the listed participants include leading organizations, such as the Library of Congress, Cornell, Oxford, Stanford, and the National Archives of Scotland. Institutional Repositories Milestones Institutional repositories (IRs) originally emerged as an open access infrastructure to help universities combat journal publishers’ skyrocketing subscription prices and to fulfil a vision of free access to scholarly information. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the product of a meeting of the Open Society Institute in December 2001, provided marching orders for librarians and academics who dreamed of making research articles in all academic fields available for free online. Tools and assistance were needed, it said, to help scholars to self-archive their work in open electronic archives (Budapest, 2002). Conceived as a way for universities to capture, preserve, and provide free access to their members’ intellectual output, IRs were deployed primarily in academic settings (Ferreira, Rodriguez, Baptista, & Saraiva, 2008). Before BOAI, the Los Alamos Physics Archive, now known as the arXiv, served as a discipline-based self-archiving depository, which by 1999 had accumulated over 100,000 papers deposited by their authors. In 2001, Cornell University assumed managerial responsibilities for arXiv where it flourishes, with more than 100,000 distinct users per day. Other smaller discipline-based archives included CoRR in computer science, CogPrints in the cognitive sciences, and PubMed Central (Harnad, 1999). The idea of institutionbased electronic repositories had been advanced as early as 1994, but had not had much success until software tools and metadata standards began to emerge over the next decade (Okerson & O’Donnell, 1995). Notably, until the Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) limned out a framework in 1999 for interactive sharing among independent sites, IRs could not compete with the discovery capabilities afforded by topical repositories (Hitchcock, Brody, Hey, &