Conference Agenda

This session will explore how a fragmented institutional repository environment in Canadian academic and research libraries is hampering our ability to preserve materials over the long-term. By looking at the origin and development of institutional repositories through the lens of digital preservation practice, an argument will be made that the IR community needs to move away from locally run infrastructure and consider how best to scale our efforts at the national level, in order to effectively connect to digital preservation processing and storage services. By looking at successful Canadian examples of the pairing of repositories and digital preservation at-scale in adjacent domains, we hope to encourage the institutional repository community to think beyond running local IRs and towards a scaled, community-led repository environment that can help academic and research libraries meet their digital preservation goals.

The Merritt Digital Preservation system manages 255 TB / 62M digital files. All content in the Merritt system has a primary copy in cloud storage and 2 replicated copies in alternative cloud storage systems. The Merritt system is composed of several microservices that have evolved over 12+ years.

Over the past 2 years, the Merritt Team has focused on several system transparency initiatives to build trust and confidence in the system with the team and with our internal stakeholders. The Merritt Team created a common set of assertions about system health that could easily be understood by all internal stakeholders of the system. Once those assertions were defined, the team created an automated set of reports to validate system health on a daily basis.

In 2018, we proposed an integration plan between the EPrints Digital Repository and the Archivematica digital preservation system. Following three years of software development, requirements refinement and testing, we released the integration as a plugin to EPrints in 2021. This presentation will revisit the original rationale for the integration of these two systems and explain how the current version of the plugin is being used and how it compares to the original integration plan. We will conclude with a discussion of some possible future enhancements envisioned for the integration.

The Virginia Tech Digital Library Platform (VTDLP) is a cloud-native and serverless platform that allows librarians, curators, and archivists to store, manage, and publish digital assets. This presentation describes an end-to-end digital library solution including preservation, storing, indexing, collection management, and publishing at the Virginia Tech Libraries. The entire platform is built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) using serverless and microservice architecture. Over these years, we implemented a suite of services that support digital curation operations. Under this microservice infrastructure, each service has its purpose and responsibility, independent software development lifecycle, and choice of technologies. All VTDLP services are integrated and communicated with each other synchronously or asynchronously. The loose coupling and pluggable design patterns enable us to continuously polish our implementation and support users' needs. Through countless iterations and improvements, the VTDLP has earned stakeholders’ trust and hosts several Virginia Tech Libraries’ digital collection websites and more will come. We are eager to share our success stories and look for future collaboration with other instructions with similar strategies.