Achieving Robust Digital Preservation at a Large Academic Library: Successes and Failures

In its two most recent five year strategic plans, Oregon State University Libraries and Press (OSULP) expressed commitments to the long term maintenance and preservation of digitized library content and curated university digital scholarship, calling for the creation of a “robust and flexible digital preservation and curation infrastructure” and “a long-term preservation system for university scholarship and digital collections developed and curated by OSU Libraries and Press.” A 2017 report described the current state of the library’s digital preservation efforts and included the following digital preservation infrastructure recommendations: using Archivematica for all the digital preservation targets contained within various repositories, increased use of the MetaArchive distributed digital preservation platform, and shifting to incremental and full backups of all digital content to cloud storage. In this presentation, the authors analyze the types and sources of content that have been selected for preservation and how they have been preserved. The presentation provides a review of what is and is not working for digital preservation at OSULP based on the recommendations and findings.