Digital Preservation Coalition

Oxford University

Excerpt from DPC Annual Report 2008-2009

Oxford University is one of the world’s great memory organisations and takes digital preservation very seriously. In the past year the Library received a $1.4m grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the futureArch project, which aims to develop the Library’s capacity for collecting, managing and preserving personal digital archives, through a new service called Bodleian Electronic Archives and Manuscripts (BEAM), a project managed by Susan Thomas and directed by Richard Ovenden. Closely allied with this work, the Library has been developing a Digital Asset Management System (DAMS) that will become the Library’s preservationstandard digital management and storage system for a wide variety of digital assets including e-print, pre-print, and e-theses, digital images, and other data sets. Based on the pioneering work of Sally Rumsey, Ben O’Steen and Neil Jeffries, for the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA), the Library’s DAMS is based on the Fedora software and a collaboration with Sun Microsystems as a Sun Center for Excellence in Digital Libraries. Richard Ovenden received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in June 2009 together with collaborators from the University of Texas at Austin and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities for work on a report describing the current state and future potential for Digital Forensics.

For more information see: http://futurearchives.blogspot.com, http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/beam and http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk