The Digital Library (DL) is committed to preservation of the digital content it creates as well as the born digital materials collected from the work of FAU faculty, administrators, and students.

Florida Digital Archive and DAITSS

The state of Florida is in the forefront of digital preservation with the implementation of the Florida Digital Archive administered by the FCLA. The Florida Digital Archive (FDA) will maintain a usable version using the best format migration tools available for materials selected as highest priority for perpetual preservation.  The FAU DL is a partner of this state initiative and sends the Florida Digital Archive all digital files to ensure that the FAU community will have access to these file for years to come. All the digital material that is produced at the DL adheres to the standards prescribed by the Florida Dark Archive for producing good archival quality digital objects. The archival quality files are then sent via FTP or DigiTool to the FDA. The ingest files obtained from FDA, which report on the process of adding a particular digital object, are compared against the local MD5 signatures of that digital object to ensure its consistency and form.

Archival formats and high confidence level formats are chosen from those prescribed by FDA under format information.

The Florida Digital Archive is based on DAITSS, a preservation repository management application, which is available as open source software under the GPL license. See http://daitss.fcla.edu

A Brief Description Concerning Digital Preservation:

Digital custodianship is a critical issue for academic libraries as they steward both digitized and born digital resources for the use of future researchers. Long-term access to digital materials requires continuing preservation efforts as storage formats, retrieval, and playback technologies are subject to rapid cycles of deterioration and obsolescence. Preservation of digital content requires careful planning for all stages of the digitization process and an ongoing commitment to maintaining usability once the materials are created.  

Digital Preservation Procedures at the Digital Library:

At the DL, preservation begins with the creation of high-quality products, scanned in adherence with international standards and guidelines set by the Library of Congress. Materials are reviewed for quality after each step of the digitization process. Metadata is created for each object, including administrative, preservation, and digital rights information.

The DL coordinates with other library departments to maintain the FAU Institutional Repository (IR) using the DigiTool platform. Faculty presentations and publications, student dissertations and theses, and documents created by administrative units are collected, stored in the repository, and made freely available online. The IR seeks to capture and preserve the intellectual material of the University for long term access and availability. Additionally, in consideration of FAU’s mission and in collaboration with academic departments, the IR is designed as a resource to be integrated into teaching and research.

After conversion or capture in digital format, master copies of all DL materials are sent and maintained at the Florida Digital Archive.

Further reading on digital preservation:

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Initiative Homepage

Florida International University’s URL-odex of Useful Links for Digital Collections

Digital preservation: a time bomb for Digital Libraries , article by Margaret Hedstrom, Associate Prosfessor in the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan

Digital Preservation Architecture and Technology for Trusted Digital Repositories, article by Ronald Jantz and Michael J. Giarlo, Rutgers University Libraries, published in D-Lib Magazine.

Institutional Repositories and Self-Archiving FAQ maintained by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)