Digital preservation is an ongoing concern for almost every aspect of higher education. We are producing digital content at an alarming rate—more than can currently be stewarded. Libraries and IT organizations have to combine their strengths to seek out scalable, enterprise solutions that can handle born digital content—content that is enormous in scope, highly complex, and iterative by nature. The Academic Preservation Trust (aptrust.org) is a partnership that seeks to leverage leaders in the field of digital preservation in order to meet some of these challenges head on. As a strategic collaboration among 17 institutions and growing, we seek to address issues such as data security, trusted digital repository status, content management strategies, and enterprise IT solutions. The APTrust serves as a first node for the Digital Preservation Network and currently uses Amazon Web Services as its back end management solution. We hope to engage participants with fresh user stories of our successes and challenges over the last two years as well as enlist them in mapping out future directions that we can all share. This session will ask its audience to point to local success stories, gaps, and specific strategic growth areas for a wide variety of organizations and sectors both inside and outside higher education.
The Preservation Puzzle will highlight specific challenges that we have encountered with working with a wide variety of partners: Presidents; Provosts; CIOs; Deans; and Librarians. In doing so, we will be soliciting feedback and shared stories from among the audience in order to foster a more transparent approach to digital preservation. Highlighting some of the challenges will help participants recognize the strengths and weaknesses in their own organizations and allow for a conversation as to strategies and tactics that have proven or could prove successful in engaging such a disparate group of digital preservation stewards.
