Conference Agenda

Preservation of repository content is a vital and complex responsibility. Institutional repositories (IRs) house unique content created by academic communities and hold a significant record of scholarship over time. Preserving this scholarship is crucial to ensure access for future generations.

Preserving IR content involves many challenges, including developing policies and procedures, building technical workflows, considering the needs of diverse file formats and disciplinary practices, and managing costs.

This presentation will look at digital preservation in IRs through one solution to those shared challenges. Scholaris is a new Canadian national, opt-in shared repository service built on the DSpace platform. Presenters are members of the Scholaris Digital Preservation Expert Group, which provides recommendations and advice on digital preservation planning requirements and pathways for the Scholaris service development team.

We will share results from a nation-wide environmental scan and survey of repository managers to gather insights on current practices, capacity, and needs related to digital preservation, as well as inform the workflows and service model we are developing in response to these needs. We hope to leave audience members with tools you can use in your own preservation work, along with a sense of optimism and a success story of national collaboration.

The emergence of two standards – IIIF and OCFL (International Image Interoperability Framework and Oxford Common File Layout) – means that a complete digital preservation and delivery infrastructure can take a standards-based and open-source approach all the way through. We will show how the University of Leeds and Digirati have used existing software and newly developed components to deliver a system, as part of the University of Leeds’ Digital Library Infrastructure Project (DLIP), that conforms to digital preservation best practices and is open to ad hoc application development and re-use. One key aspect of this is the use of Fedora as a gateway to OCFL and the ability for components other than Fedora to make use of this standards-based structure. The presentation will describe the project, problems it aims to address, the approach adopted and ask questions about the role of METS in between the two outer standards-based boundaries of IIIF and OCFL.

Are you curious about formatting documents for accessibility? Interested in making your ETDs available to people using assistive technology? Embedding Accessibility into ETD Workflows: A Case Study analyzes how one campus took a flailing accessibility formatting program and turned it into a successful, scalable, and less-stressful process. We flipped the process completely: from having the students handle the formatting to taking it in-house and having library workers do the work. We will share our pinch-points and our successes with attendees. This case study examines the evolution of the ETD/accessibility workflow from how it started to the one that is currently in use and successful over more than a decade of constant iterative process improvement. The presenter aims to give others information that could help them to advocate for embedding accessibility formatting into their own workflows. With this structure in place, we have incorporated accessibility formatting into other workflows, including faculty publications and digital archives materials. Accessibility formatting takes time, can be complex, and still requires human intervention at this time, but it is important. ETDs are official campus documents. Making them available for people using assistive technology is the equitable - and right - thing to do.

At OR2023 the Practice Research Voices and Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Education project findings (10.5281/zenodo.8091553) highlighted the limitations of the current repositories landscape and open standards to enable Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) practice research. The teams have joined together, developed a metadata standard for practice research, engaged with discipline and open standards communities, published findings, and are working towards setting up a Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group.

Global engagement has demonstrated the need to articulate what practice research is and the benefits of using this lens to go beyond the assumption that ‘non-traditional research outputs’ are defined by their format and merely supplementary.

This presentation will discuss opportunities for open and research data repositories to: (1) develop community owned open infrastructure working in co-design with discipline communities; (2) make the research process visible as it is developed; (3) implement accessibility, user interface and user experience best practice; (4) capture a more inclusive range of contributors (5) enable re-use that respects rights owners and provenance and (6) act as a space to adopt and inform changes to open standards and influence a more nuanced aligned strategy and policy landscape and initiatives.