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Digital Preservation

Digital preservation is the series of activities to prepare and manage content for long-term access. Our mission is, to preserve, protect, and provide sustaining access to the cultural and historical heritage of Virginia Tech and the state of Virginia by digitizing, preserving, and providing access to digital assets both from Virginia Tech and from the southwest region of Virginia. This aspect of data curation requires active management involving the normalization of content, ingest of copies stored in geographically different locations with regular fixity checks and file migrations. For detailed information, see our Digital Preservation Policy.

On this page:

 

Glossary

External link to Digital Preservation Glossary.

 

Technologies

At Virginia Tech, we employ several technologies and workflows for preserving our institutional repositories.

Amazon Web Services is our Local Cloud Storage service. Features include unlimited expansion, elimination of volume size restrictions, 180 day retention of unlimited numbers of versions, delete access restricted to Administrators. This storage is located in Amazon region us-east-1, Virginia.

Academic Preservation Trust is one of our distributed digital preservation storage services. It is a consortium of institutions dedicated to long-term and collaborative digital preservation that is hosted at UVA.

MetaArchive Cooperative is one of our distributed digital preservation storage services. It is a distributed digital preservation network that is hosted on 15 geographically separated nodes and functions on the LOCKSS system.

Archive-It is a subscription-based web archiving services from the Internet Archive that we use to web crawl Virginia Tech’s web presence. See the Virginia Tech Web Archive at https://archive-it.org/collections/5315.

 

Process

Items that are processed by our Digital Imaging team are ingested into the VTDLP access and preservation system. The preservation system performs virus checks, generates a unique identifier and a checksum, logs these events in a modified PREMIS schema, and deposits content into our secondary cloud storage. Based on our Preservation Strategies, select content is also ingested into either APTrust or MetaArchive for additional distributed digital preservation storage.

In the event of data loss or corruption in our access files, Digital Preservation Services will be notified and will communicate with the appropriate storage service to retrieve the preserved copy. 

The VTDLP performs fixity checks every 90 days and performs test restorations on randomly selected content to ensure the functionality of the preservation system.

 

Policies

Additional policies regarding preservation activities can be found on the Digital Library Policies and Procedures page.