The Texas Digital Library Preservation Network

Date

2007-05-30

Authors

Maslov, Alexey

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Abstract

The Texas Digital Library is a collaborative project between public and private institutions across Texas that aims to provide curation, preservation, and access to digital scholarly information for the State. The preservation component of this mission means that TDL is committed to the long-term maintenance of its digital assets. Accomplishing this goal necessitates the creation of a TDL-wide preservation network. An effective preservation solution would encompass the following characteristics: • No single point of failure: by sharing copies of the same data between multiple geographically distributed locations, we ensure that failure of any one location does not result in permanent data loss. • Local allocation of resources: any member institution that joins the network would retain full control over the utilization of the resources they commit to the network. • Shared responsibility: responsibility for preserving digital assets is shared across all of the members of the network, eliminating reliance on any one institution’s resources. • Architectural flexibility: new locations can efficiently be added to the network, allowing for unforeseen growth. The TDL Preservation Network is a current project that seeks to address these issues. To accomplish these goals, we have designed a system with the following layered architecture: • User layer: represents the pool of users that have access to the preservation network system. This pool will be determined by the established policies and submission agreements at the institution level. • Application layer: contains the set of applications that can generate the data for the network, such as institutional repositories, e-journals, courseware management systems, and faculty archives. • Service layer: consists of a federation of data locations that implement preservation polices. This is the layer where the actual replication of data is performed and agreements between locations are brokered and recorded.
• Storage layer: responsible for maintaining the individual copies of the preserved artifacts, and can be implemented with any number of standard technologies. This presentation will describe the current progress toward the implementation of the TDL Preservation Network, and the long-term goals for data preservation in the Texas Digital Library.

Description

Presentation slides for the 2007 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL).

Citation