Beyond the Repository: Integrating Local Preservation Systems with National Distribution Services

An essential aspect of digital preservation is risk management. To aid in mitigating risk factors several Distributed Digital Preservation (DDP) services have emerged. As these services have matured, the problem of integrating data from a local repository with a distributed service has not been resolved. In 2016, Northwestern University and the University of California, San Diego were awarded an IMLS National Leadership Grant, LG-72-16-0135-16, to identify technical solutions to bridge the gap between local repository systems and dark, distributed preservation systems.The grant team and the advisory board coalesced around three recommendations:1.Develop a decision-making toolkit for choosing materials to send to DDP systems. 2. A shared BagIt profile to increase interoperability. 3. create the specifications for a shared API that can be used by service providers to create dashboards for better resource tracking. This project with tackle implementing recommendation 1 and 2, with the hopes that the grant participants will coalesce and work towards recommendation 3 outside the grant project.