Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation: Assessing Current Practices at Research Libraries

Institutional Repositories and Digital Preservation: Assessing Current Practices at Research Libraries. Yuan Li, Meghan Banach. D-Lib Magazine. May/June 2011.
If the digital scholarly record is to be preserved, libraries need to establish new best practices for preservation. For their part, creators need to be more proactive about archiving their work. Institutional Repositories may provide some help in preserving digitial materials, but some  question whether IRs were intended to provide long-term preservation of digital scholarship.  

The most important roles that IRs play are to collect, manage, and disseminate the digital scholarship that their communities produce. Most content in an IR is deposited by author self-archiving, by third party on behalf of the author, and by repository staff. Regardless of how content is deposited in the IR, the quality of deposited content should be examined before digital preservation actions are considered, since the quality of content can directly affect the success of digital preservation efforts. Problems may include format obsolescence, poor quality images, and insufficient metadata to manage and preserve the materials.

While most report that their IRs are currently providing long-term digital preservation, a closer look shows they are really in a planning process to provide long-term preservation rather than providing it in a fully operational way. An increasing number of research libraries have started to move digital preservation programs ahead by developing preservation policies.