Digital Preservation

Mission

The mission of the Digital Preservation Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University Library is to ensure continued access and use of digital materials stewarded by the library. Digital preservation procedures and policies implemented and applied are documented and continually evaluated for internal effectiveness, efficiency and alignment with the greater Digital Preservation community.

The term digital preservation does not represent a single discrete action. As defined by the American Library Association’s Resource Guide:

Digital preservation is a set of activities aimed towards ensuring access to digital materials over time. In the United States digital preservation tends to be interpreted as the life-cycle management of materials from the point of their creation, while in the United Kingdom the term digital curation is used for life-cycle management while digital preservation is reserved for those activities specifically geared towards future accessibility.
– Caplan, Priscilla. “Chapter 1: What Is Digital Preservation?” Library Technology Reports 44, no. 2 (February/March 2008): 7-9.

The Library’s digital preservation policies, strategies and actions are designed to ensure access to content that originated in a digital form as well as digital materials created through reformatting actions.

Systems and Services

The Medusa digital preservation repository provides an enduring storage and management environment for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library’s digital collections. At present, Medusa’s collecting focus is on digitized and “born digital” books, manuscripts, photographs, audiovisual materials, scholarly publications, and research data from the library’s special collections, general collections, and institutional repository. All master files created by the library’s digitization units, for example, are by default deposited into Medusa. Access to the collection registry is restricted to digital content producers at the University of Illinois Library.