News

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) welcomes University of the Arts London (UAL) as its latest Associate Member this week.

UAL is strategically committed to digital preservation prioritising its historical and contemporary archives and special collections, both digitised and born-digital.  As an art and design institution, the university’s collections are many and varied, including documents, books, photographs, costume, and object collections – many with national and international significance. Having recently completed a discovery and procurement process for a digital preservation system, UAL sees digital preservation as an essential activity that will also provide a platform for increased visibility and use of their unique collections for teaching and research, as well as collaboration beyond the university and into the wider art and design academic community, and other areas of community collaboration.

The Digital Preservation Coalition welcomes Lancaster University Library as its newest Associate Member this week.

Currently establishing its digital preservation policy specifically to look after the long-term preservation of research outcomes, the Library’s key aim is to ensure that future generations can benefit from the scholarly digital outputs created by the world-class research and teaching undertaken at Lancaster University. One of the Jisc RDSS pilot institutions, Lancaster University brings extensive experience of working with shared services, interoperability between systems and applying this expertise to digital preservation.

Data Archiving and Network Service (DANS) has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) this week, becoming its newest Associate member.

Underpinning and continuously improving its services through research on sustainable access to digital research resources, DANS was a member of the 4C Project (Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation) and was part of the team which developed the Curation Costs Exchange (CCEx). Launched in 2014, the CCEx is a community owned platform which helps organisations of any kind assess the costs of curation practices through comparison and analysis. Allowing the CCEx aims to provide real information about costs to help make more informed investments in digital curation. 

“DANS is a wonderful, world-leading organisation, well known to many in the digital preservation community.  Their list of achievements and history of innovation is daunting, but even more important has been the openness and generosity which characterizes their approach. They have been at the forefront of some very important initiatives over the years, like the Data Seal of Approval, the Research Data Alliance and the 4C Project,” says Executive Director of the DPC William Kilbride. “DANS was a key partner in the development of the Curation Costs Exchange, work which we will sustain and progress as we continue to collaborate on our shared challenge of digital preservation.”

The Digital Preservation Coalition welcomes Durham University as its latest Associate Member this week.

While the University looks after parchment, paper and other physical documents going back centuries, digital material presents new challenges for both storage and retrieval. A new Digital Repository will provide capacity for the storage, preservation and dissemination of digital material of all kinds; including open access research publications, research data, theses, digitised versions of items from archives, rare books, museum and art collections, and the archives of the University. The repository is crucial to the University’s dissemination of research outputs, compliance with research funding requirements, and managed access to digital resources of all kinds, for research, education, administration, external engagement and communication.

The University of Melbourne Library has joined the Digital Preservation Coalition this week, becoming the DPC’s newest Associate member.

The University of Melbourne is Australia’s leading research-intensive University, generating considerable digital collections of enduring value. The University Library provides key research infrastructure in the form of scholarly and research collections, support and services which include digitisation services, data forensics services and research data management support. The University of Melbourne Digital Preservation Strategy aims to ensure that preservation of digital materials is integrated into the University’s research programmes. It outlines a ten-year program which will make the University’s digital outputs available to future generations.

The University of Kent’s Templeman Library has become the latest organisation to join the Digital Preservation Coalition, making it the twenty-fifth University to do so.

The library’s digital preservation activities focus on digitised and born-digital collections curated by Information Services on behalf of the University. These include research data sets, research outputs, and archive material cared for by Special Collections & Archives, as well as images created by the Digital Imaging team services, and associated metadata held within digital files and within catalogues/databases.