Overview of UTL's practices
The University of Texas Libraries provides long-term stewardship to collection materials to support the needs of the UT community. A vast portion of these materials are in a digital format, whether it be digitized or born-digital material. Digital preservation involves lifecycle planning and support for these digital assets with the purpose of maintaining their authenticity, usability, and sustainability into the long-term future.
UTL has developed digital preservation strategies and infrastructures for over two decades with the goal of increasing the longevity of these assets. The Libraries’ Digital Stewardship Unit has adopted workflows and practices modeled after national and international standards, such as the Open Archival Information System reference model (OAIS; ISO 14721) and the Levels of Digital Preservation self-assessment model (National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)). Currently, the unit stewards over 16 million digital files comprising over 500 Terabytes of digital collection materials in our long-term digital archive.
Scope of the digital archive
The digital preservation activities of UT Libraries create an archive of digital content that is deliberately selected for adding to the collection; to preserve it and make it available for study and research by members or affiliates of UT, and—to the extent possible—in some cases by the general public.
For example, content is in scope if it is unique in the holdings of UT Libraries, or deemed particularly valuable because of its provenance, cultural significance, or stated value for research (see for instance Parent et al.). Digital content for which UTL has entered formal, written agreements to steward, for instance as part of post-custodial collaborations, can be included if the terms of the commitment are established in consultation with the Digital Stewardship unit.
The digital preservation activities do not cover records (“State Records”) created by UTL units. Records are subject to UT's Record Retention Schedule (UTRRS), and it is the responsibility of the unit creating records to comply with the applicable law and record management policies.
The digital preservation activities in general cover digital material irrespective of the origin or method of creation, both ‘born-digital’ as well as the product of digital reformatting/digitization. However, UTL cannot promise to preserve all types of digital objects, and it cannot promise to preserve digital objects in their original form for future use. Collection decisions must consider the technical feasibility of future use and must consider the need for UTL to process and modify digital data for continued stewardship.
2024-2028 Digital Preservation Strategy
In the Fall of 2023, UTL’s Digital Stewardship unit developed a five-year Digital Preservation Strategy that addresses the goals and needs to upgrade and sustain the library’s digital archive. The document includes the following recommendations:
Automate digital preservation activities
Modernize and scale local digital archive storage infrastructure
Increase geographical redundancy of digital archival storage
Improve discoverability and management of digital archive contents
Build, document, and disseminate digital preservation framework
Learn more about UTL’s Digital Preservation Strategy.
General concepts
The OAIS reference model distinguishes between different related representations of digital content: Submission Information Packages, Archival Information Packages, and Dissemination Information Packages. These help us establish common language for shared archival concepts and terminology. Below is a list of these concepts and their definition when applied to UTL’s digital preservation workflow.
Producers: Entities that create or provide the SIPs to the digital archive. example: collection managers and delivery coordinators
Submission Information Packages (SIPs): Content as submitted by producers to the Digital Preservation Coordinator for processing and storage in the digital archive.
Archival Information Packages (AIPs): Processed and bagged content preserved long-term. Each “bag” preserved in the digital archive is an AIP.
Bag: refers to the Library of Congress’ “BagIt” specification, consists of a payload and tags. The payload is the submitted SIP nested in a “data” folder and the tags are the metadata files that document the creation of the bag.
Dissemination Information Package (DIPs): Any set of materials retrieved from the digital archive per request.
Intellectual entity: “a coherent set of content that is described as a unit: e.g., a book” as defined by the Digital Preservation Coalition