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Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles

Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles
Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles
Digital and institutional repositories are changing, and rapidly growing repositories targetting new types of digital content, including data and teaching materials, from science to the arts, now complement the established research papers repository. For the first time we have been able to compare and contrast these different repository types using tools designed to assist digital preservation analysis by identifying file formats and producing profiles of the distribution of formats in each repository. Imagine that such repositories were to coalesce into a single, coordinated institutional repository. We do not have such broad repositories today. The JISC KeepIt Project worked with four exemplars, including one of each of type of repository: research papers, science data, arts, and education and teaching. All these exemplars either are, or plan to become, institutional in scope even though limited to a specified type of content. Thus, combined, the exemplars might represent the institutional repository of the future. It is worth bearing in mind how the combined format profiles might look, and the consequent implications for preservation, when contemplating the prospect.
Digital repositories, Institutional repositories, Digital preservation, Digital file formats, Format profiles
Hitchcock, Steve
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Tarrant, David
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Hitchcock, Steve
c0b120a1-439e-43c9-9ba6-647e77f40f3c
Tarrant, David
4aec820b-6055-4f58-abeb-1cc901eb19f2

Hitchcock, Steve and Tarrant, David (2011) Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles. Ariadne, (66).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Digital and institutional repositories are changing, and rapidly growing repositories targetting new types of digital content, including data and teaching materials, from science to the arts, now complement the established research papers repository. For the first time we have been able to compare and contrast these different repository types using tools designed to assist digital preservation analysis by identifying file formats and producing profiles of the distribution of formats in each repository. Imagine that such repositories were to coalesce into a single, coordinated institutional repository. We do not have such broad repositories today. The JISC KeepIt Project worked with four exemplars, including one of each of type of repository: research papers, science data, arts, and education and teaching. All these exemplars either are, or plan to become, institutional in scope even though limited to a specified type of content. Thus, combined, the exemplars might represent the institutional repository of the future. It is worth bearing in mind how the combined format profiles might look, and the consequent implications for preservation, when contemplating the prospect.

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More information

Published date: 30 January 2011
Keywords: Digital repositories, Institutional repositories, Digital preservation, Digital file formats, Format profiles
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 273241
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/273241
PURE UUID: 7a3a1a18-6920-4300-af99-8198057a987a

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Date deposited: 29 Feb 2012 12:52
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 10:22

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Contributors

Author: Steve Hitchcock
Author: David Tarrant

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