DPC Featured Project

The aim of this series is to highlight some of the DPC member projects listed in the DPC Members' Projects Table

A project will be highlighted on the Home Page of the DPC website every 6-8 weeks and older versions will be retained in the table of DPC Member projects.

In the first of the series, Andrew Wilson, Preservation Services and Projects Manager for the Arts and Humanities Data Service, was interviewed by Maggie Jones about the SHERPA DP project.

Published 04 January 2006

SHERPA DP Project

What's the link between SHERPA DP and the SHERPA project?

The original Sherpa project was essentially aimed at developing and implementing institutional e-prints repositories at a number of academic institutions around the country. One of the ancillary aims of Sherpa was to investigate the preservation of e-prints using the OAIS framework, but the original project was not intended to go beyond the investigation and subsequent report (see http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/advice/preservation.html). The initial Sherpa-DP project proposal developed directly out of this aspect of the original Sherpa project. In a sense Sherpa-DP is a child of the Sherpa project.

What does SHERPA DP aim to do?

The project is investigating a sustainable repository-independent model for preservation, through outsourcing of the preservation activities modeled in OAIS to a third-party service provider. In the case of SHERPA-DP, AHDS will supply a remote digital preservation service to a number of institutional e-prints repositories around the country, partners in the original Sherpa project.

What difference could SHERPA DP make to institutional repositories in the UK?

We believe that this model has the potential to offer significant benefits to institutional repositories: the outsourced preservation service will undertake the activities necessary to preserve e-prints through storage, migration and the creation of appropriate metadata; the participating e-prints repositories will be able to continue with their advocacy, ingest and dissemination work, while offering a guarantee to depositors that the intellectual content they deposit will be preserved in the long-term.

What do you see as the major advantages of a collaborative preservation model?

The collaborative model proposed by the project will take advantage of the skills and expertise developed by institutional repositories in the management of digital resources, but will remove from each individual institutional repository the burden of adding a preservation layer to their repository, and the need for them to seek to employ scarce preservation management skills and expertise.

Why does AHDS’s experience make it such a good choice for a project like this?

AHDS is a logical choice for such a project because of the range and depth of its experience over the last decade. AHDS was established by JISC and the AHRB specifically to preserve the digital outputs of research in the Arts and Humanities. The primary focus of the work of AHDS over the last decade has been in developing and documenting strategies for the preservation of a wide range of digital resources. And since AHDS wants to share its expertise among the wider community, Sherpa-DP is an appropriate project to apply the results of our research and operational work to the digital preservation issues experienced within the UK Higher Education community.

Who are the SHERPA DP partners?

All of the Sherpa-DP partners were partners in the original Sherpa project, although not all the original Sherpa project partners are Sherpa-DP partners. The Sherpa-DP partners are:

University of Nottingham
University of Edinburgh
University of Glasgow
White Rose Partnership
 - University of Leeds, University of Sheffield, University of York
London LEAP Consortium
 - UCL, Birkbeck, Imperial, King's, LSE SOAS, Royal Holloway.

Do they use different repository platforms?

Glasgow uses DSpace as its repository platform, all the other institutional repositories involved in Sherpa-DP use the EPrints application.

Will other institutional repositories be able to use the collaborative preservation model?

Our hope is that once the project has been completed the conceptual model we will be testing in the project will prove to be viable and cost-effective. The conceptual model being tested by the project is not institutionally specific. If the approach does prove to be viable then the model could be adopted by any institutional repository.

Does it matter if repositories are using different software?

In theory, no. Our aim is to develop and implement a solution that is not software specific. It should not matter which repository software is being used, the strategy developed by the project will be applicable to any institutional repository.

The project is due to end at the end of 2006, do you expect to present some findings and results before then?

The project started a little later than initially planned so it will not finish until the end of February 2007. We plan to make findings and result of the project available from time to time, as specific milestone documents are finalised. Of course, we are also more than happy to share some of our working documents with other interested parties.

Why is the OAIS model so important for this model?

The OAIS model is important because it is, to date, the only systematic attempt to develop a conceptual framework for a complete archival system for digital resources. It may not be a perfect framework but I believe it is a significant advance in thinking about the whole set of archival processes that need to be applied to digital resources. One of the strengths of OAIS is that it is not prescriptive about how the framework should be implemented.

How will others benefit from this project?

AHDS believes that the project will benefit the digital preservation community generally in a number of ways. Firstly, it should provide proof of concept for a cooperative devolved preservation service within the OAIS framework. This will be a great value to institutions that may not be able to afford to establish a complete OAIS system of their own but who are able to outsource the preservation part of the process – arguably the most expensive. Secondly, the project will contribute to the development and testing of tools to assist the digital preservation process. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the project will be publishing a ‘Digital Repository Handbook’ which will recommend standards, best practice, protocol and processes used in the management, preservation and presentation of e-print repositories.

Assuming the project demonstrates proof of concept, do you have any thoughts about a business model to sustain this work beyond the project funding?

We have been thinking about this issue a lot but as yet have not developed any clear business model. This will be one of the project outputs so more work will be undertaken on this issue over the next year. There’s nothing that is in a state to be shared outside AHDS at the moment.

Further information about SHERPA DP can be found from the project website at:
http://ahds.ac.uk/about/projects/sherpa-dp/