Digital Preservation

Digital preservation is the active management of digital content over time. It combines policies, strategies, and actions to ensure ongoing access to and accurate rendering of authentic reformatted and born-digital content. We work closely with colleagues in Special Collections and Archives, the California Digital Library, and Library IT to steward UCI Libraries digital collections and make them available online.

Migration to Sustainable Formats

Legacy Archival Media Migration Platform (LAMMP) (downloadable presentation): A largely automated local process that uses a custom workstation to rescue potentially valuable digital content from rapidly aging digital media formats (e.g. floppy disks, CD-ROM, etc.)

Format Migration: Formats are most likely to be accessible in the future when they are widely used and open, meaning the technical specifications of the file format are well documented and open to all. We migrate content from fragile or potentially obsolete formats to sustainable formats based on international guidelines and best practices

Reliable Storage for Long-term Access

Merritt: a cost-effective repository service that lets the UC community manage, archive, and share its valuable digital content. Merritt performs all critical long-term preservation tasks, such as fixity checking, replication, assigning permanent identifiers using EZID. We currently use Merritt as a "Dark Archive", i.e., preservation without public access, although special access may be granted upon consultation

Merritt is used as the back-end preservation system for UC or UCI hosted platforms of different nature and purposes:

  • Calisphere: a shared platform and public interface for managing, searching, and displaying selected digital resources contributed by all ten campuses of UC and other important libraries, archives, and museums throughout California, providing free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration
  • eScholarship: a dynamic research platform providing Open-Access scholarly publishing services to the University of California and scholars worldwide. See UCI departments and research centers' collections
  • Dryad: a platform for sharing and archiving research data, designed to be a self-service tool for researchers. See Dryad is now available

Web Archiving

Archive-It: a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of web content. All harvested collections are accessible via the Wayback Machine. Managed UC-wide by California Digital Library