Running Up That Hill: The Academic Preservation Trust: A Community Based Approach to Digital Preservation

Notes: View the community notes Google doc for this session.

Session Type: Project Update

Slides: View the slides for this update here.

Session Description The Academic Preservation Trust (APT), a consortium of 17 institutions, was formed two and a half years ago when a small group of academic library deans agreed to take a community approach in building and managing a repository that would provide long-term preservation of the scholarly record. The repository also aims to aggregate content, to provide for disaster recovery, to leverage economies of scale, and to explore access and other services. From its beginning, APTrust has been a layered collaboration of deans, technology experts, content/preservation specialists, and a small APTrust staff located at the University of Virginia.

The growth of the consortium has been bumpy at times, with differences of opinion regarding technology decisions and, inside the University of Virginia, in building awareness that an entrepreneurial program requires quick responses from the infrastructure. APTrust remains repository and format agnostic by using the Baglt specification for content submission. Metadata is managed by Fedora with pointers to content preserved in Amazon S3 and Glacier with administrative functions built using Hydra and Blacklight. The repository is scheduled to go live in July and will become a DPN node. A panel of APTrust partners and UVA staff will describe the interplay in decision making among deans, technologists, and content experts and will discuss the evolving nature of an effort that is approaching full production, including questions of governance, business modeling, certification goals and the consortium’s evolving approach to the complex issues related to digital preservation.

Session Leaders Bradley Daigle, University of Virginia Scott Turnbull, APTrust Laura Capell, University of Miami Stephen Davis, Columbia University Elisabeth Long, University of Chicago Nathan Tallman, University of Cincinnati