Exploring strategies for digital preservation for DSpace@Cambridge

Preserving the functionality of digital objects (as opposed to just the bitstream), whether text, images, or scientific data, is a dauntingly complex task. The DSpace@Cambridge project, a joint project of Cambridge University Library and MIT Libraries, in partnership with Cambridge University Computing Service, has among its goals to further develop DSpace in the area of digital preservation. With this project we hope to demonstrate the possibilities of implementing digital preservation within the context of existing institutional repositories, and also to cover new ground in some small areas of digital preservation. By evaluating existing tools for integration into DSpace, and perhaps creating tools that can be widely re-used, we can provide a concrete example of their use. The digital preservation project is a work in progress, and in this paper we report on our current status and also on our plans for the remaining portions of the project. There are three main themes in the DSpace@Cambridge research: process automation, preservation planning, and a specific file format investigation on ArcView export file format.