Digital Preservation and Repository Program Update 

July 2008 will mark the ten-year anniversary of the Library  Digital Initiative. During the past decade, the Harvard libraries and museums have made substantial investments in the development of infrastructure and expertise to support the work of acquiring, licensing, scanning, cataloging, storing, and integrating digital library content into the Harvard academic enterprise. A key aspect of these developments has been the evolution of new forms of metadata—needed not only for discovery and access, but also to help ensure our commitment to long-term preservation of digital content. Even ten years ago, we knew that digital preservation would be one of the key challenges of our profession in the 21st century.

After years of discussion and analysis, the Harvard University Library has taken the next major step in a commitment to long-term digital preservation with the establishment of the Digital Preservation Program in the Office for Information Systems (OIS) of the Harvard University Library.  This spring, Andrea Goethals assumed the newly created position of digital preservation and repository manager. Andrea will be responsible for providing leadership in the development and operation of Harvard’s digital preservation program and for the management and oversight of the Digital Repository Service (DRS), Harvard’s large-scale digital preservation repository. The Harvard digital repository has been in production for more than eight years and future development will focus on the expanding demands of the Harvard community for persistent digital asset management.

Andrea has been a digital library software engineer in OIS since January 2005. Before coming to Harvard, Andrea worked as a digital preservation software engineer/file format specialist at the Florida Center for Library Automation. Andrea was an active participant on PREMIS (PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies), a working group jointly sponsored by OCLC and RLG from 2003 to 2005, and she has a passionate interest in the difficult and important challenges of long-term digital preservation.

The initial challenge of creating a Digital Preservation Program will be to identify our most pressing priorities—as always, the projects and work to be done far outnumber the resources available. As part of this process we expect to focus on two broad areas. The first is defining additional infrastructure requirements to more fully support digital preservation, including enhancements to the Digital repository and the development of the Global Digital Formats Registry (GDFR). Second, Andrea will be doing some specific analysis of several new formats for the DRS, including projects to analyze the preservation requirements for both PDF files and e-mail.

As the program evolves, Andrea also has plans to develop more open channels of communication with community members regarding digital preservation and repository needs at Harvard. Stay tuned. Andrea can be reached in OIS at 5-3724 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Tracey Robinson is the head of the Office for Information Systems in the Harvard University Library.