Phase I (2004-2007)
Phase 1 of the ECHO DEPository project aimed specifically to address the issues
of how we collect, manage, preserve, and make useful the enormous amount
of digital information our culture is now producing. To do so, partners
on this project collaborated to produce tools, practices, evaluations,
and research findings that will aid institutions in selecting and preserving
electronic resources in a variety of digital repositories, and that will
provide insight into the continuing challenges of long-term digital preservation.
These activities fell into the following four core areas:
- Selection rationale development
Articulating a rationale and methodology for selecting digital
materials for preservation, whether Web-accessible or not, as
aggregates, rather than at the item level, based on archival
principles, and using provenance, functional analysis, and context
analysis to facilitate meta-tagging for retrieval.
- Tools development
Building software based on the above model to facilitate selection
and preservation of digital materials, using an approach which can be
scaled for varying degrees of human intervention to complement the
automated rules.
- Repository evaluation
Installing, configuring, testing and evaluating existing open-source
digital repository systems in order to examine real-world problems
encountered in the process of digital archiving.
- Long-term preservation research
Conducting research into the problems of preserving the authenticity and semantic meaning of digital resources through time.
Collecting, selecting and preserving digital information requires
approaches and resources that are substantively different from those we
have used traditionally. By providing improved tools and practical
advice based on real implementations of digital repositories, the overall ECHO
DEPository project aims to provide assistance for organizations working
to select, collect and preserve digital materials today, as well as to
provide insight into techniques for preserving digitally archived
materials into the future.
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