Ensuring Continuous Access to Resources

Ensuring Continuous Access to Resources

The central task of stewardship is to ensure that researchers, students and their teachers have continuity of access to the resources they need.

Online access to digital content brings many benefits but we need to plan and to act in order to achieve assurance that this access persists. That means assurance that digital content continues to exist in usable form ('digital preservation') and that there is sufficient means of access ('access continuity' or 'perpetual access'), including enduring licence (whether as open access or assured post-cancellation access).

Universities and colleges, as well as national agencies, need to decide how they can ensure success of initiatives at the network level, whether in consortium or at the national and international level. As a national data centre, EDINA is playing a leading part, not only on the digital content connected to its services but more generally seeking out ways in which it can contribute through cooperative activity with others.

Activities at EDINA

Preservation initiatives for long-term access to e-journal and other scholarly content.

• UK LOCKSS Alliance: Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) is cooperative of libraries locally maintaining e-journal archives; EDINA provides technical and organisational support.
• CLOCKSS: EDINA acts as an open access platform for orphaned e-journal content from the CLOCKSS Archive Node maintained by the University of Edinburgh.
• Piloting an E-Journals Preservation Registry Service (PEPRS): A project with ISSN-IC to scope and test how to provide reliable and up-to-date information on who is looking after what e-journal content.
• PECAN: a scoping study with JISC Collections to establish how to enact the post-cancellation clause in NESLi2, investigating a network-level entitlements registry, a locate facility and merit for a UK-based central archive.
• Data Audit Framework: EDINA contributed to the methodology for the framework developed by the Digital Curation Centre by assisting a University of Edinburgh implementation project.

Repository services for open access and other licensed educational materials, including research data - especially geospatial and audiovisual content.

• Jorum: the UK repository for sharing online teaching and learning materials, developed and delivered in partnership with Mimas.
• ShareGeo: a facility within the EDINA Digimap service for sharing geo-spatial data, especially but not limited to that using OS map data.
• OpenDepot.org: Begun as a national facility to support UK/JISC policy for Open Access, this is now an international facility to help authors release material under terms of open access and deposit in their institutional repository.
• Open Access Repository Junction: a project to develop the Repository Junction function in the Depot into a stand-alone broker mechanism for use by others.

Useful links

UK-based organisations and initiatives

• Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC): The JISC is funded by the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils of the UK, and in turn funds a wide range of infrastructure, services, innovative projects and studies. Along with many other areas of work, the JISC works in digital repositories and digital preservation and curation.
• JISC Collections: Funded by JISC, JISC Collections provides its members with a catalogue of free and subscription-based online resources such as e-journals, e-books, full text databases, digital images, online film, and geospatial data. They also produce reports such as 'A practical Guide to e-journal archiving solutions'.
• Digital Curation Centre: The JISC-funded DCC supports UK institutions who store, manage and preserve digital data, to help ensure their enhancement and their continuing long-term use.
• British Library Preservation Advisory Centre: supports the preservation of library and archive collections of all types through the provision of preservation management tools, training and information services.
• UKCoRR - United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories: UKCoRR has a vision of the work of repository management as a professionally recognised and supported role within UK research institutions.
• Repositories Support Project: The Repositories Support Project (RSP) is a major JISC initiative to support the development and growth of the UK repositories network.
• Research Libraries UK (RLUK): RLUK is a membership organisation of academic libraries in the UK that seeks to work with its partners, nationally and internationally, to shape and to realise the vision of the modern research library.
• UK National Archives Digital Preservation department: set up in 2001 and charged with developing a method of storing, preserving and providing access to electronic government records.
• UKSG journal Transfer initiative: Code of Practice to help publishers ensure that journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers when there is a transfer between parties.
• Coleg: Learning Materials Repository for Scotland's colleges.

Other relevant international initiatives

• Australian National Data Service: ANDS is funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR).
• CASPAR - Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval : an Integrated Project co-financed by the European Union within the Sixth Framework Programme.
• Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC): The DPC is a not-for profit membership organisation whose primary objective is to raise awareness of the importance of the preservation of digital material and the attendant strategic, cultural and technological issues.
• Digital Preservation Europe (DPE): DPE fosters collaboration and synergies between many existing national initiatives across the European Research Area.
• Digital Library Federation: links to CLIR, DLF, and CPA preservation initiatives, research reports, and related information resources.
• DRIVER: The Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) project aims to provide a unified approach to manage a challenging and evolving Digital Repository landscape by building an infrastructure for sharing content and functionality.
• eIFL - Open Access: eIFL-OA seeks to enhance access to research thereby accelerating innovation and economical development in the countries participating in eIFL network.
• KB e-Depot and Digital Preservation: The Dutch National Library's e-Depot is a digital archiving environment that ensures long-term access to digital objects.
• NESTOR: NESTOR is a co-operative project of libraries, archives and museums in Germany that, along with leading experts, forms a network of expertise in long-term preservation and long-term availability of digital resources.
• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Data Preservation working group: addressing technical and institutional challenges posed by data preservation.
• Open Knowledge Foundation: The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open knowledge in all its forms.
• PADI: gateway to international digital preservation resources and to ICADS (IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Digital Strategies).
• PLANETS: Home: Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) s a four-year project, from 2006-2010, co-funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework.
• PORTICO: PORTICO offers a digital preservation and archiving service which provides a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals. Initial support for Portico was provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and JSTOR.
• SPARC Europe: Advocating change in scholarly communications for the benefit of researchers and society.
• Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners (DataNet): 2009-funded US National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative.
• US Library of Congress Digital Preservation program: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.