| Tom Cramer Associate Director of Digital Library Systems & Services Stanford University | Rachel Gollub Manager of Development & Research, Library Technology Stanford University |
For the past several years, Stanford has been engaged in developing the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR), a set of general purpose, back-office, preservation services for the university’s and academia’s diverse streams of content. The SDR is now in production, and ramping up its capacity to be able to ingest a sustained rate of 1 TB of content a day. Central to the SDR’s design are three tenets: First, preservation is its primary purpose, with access being a secondary consideration. Second, it must serve as generic preservation infrastructure, equally capable of preserving content ranging from geospatial data (collected as part of Stanford’s efforts in the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program’s National Geospatial Digital Archive project), to millions of Google-digitized books, from formally curated digital library collections, to faculty-generated datasets and documents submitted to the SDR cum institutional repository. Third and finally, that its architecture, individual components, and ongoing operations be both serviceable and adaptable, allowing for steady evolution and enhancements over time without compromising progress in the present.
This project briefing will provide a case study of Stanford’s experiences in going from early prototypes to a production repository. In addition to the SDR’s programmatic requirements, overall design, and detailed technical architecture, trials (and errors) in technology design, metadata schema, operational constraints, security concerns, staffing and organizational considerations, and hardware (storage and server) platforms will be discussed.
Handout (MS Word)
Presentation (PDF)