Preservation and Curation in Institutional Repositories

Abstract

Institutional repositories were originally intended as a way of giving immediate and wide access to research papers. They are increasingly taking on a role as curators of institutional digital output, requiring the adoption of specific policies and tools for preservation and curation. In the ten years since the first dedicated institutional repository software was released, a range of tools have been developed to assist in everything from drawing up preservation plans and policies to extracting preservation metadata from files, alongside modular architectures for linking all the tools together. While the uptake of these technologies and techniques in repositories is modest, there are encouraging signs of progress.