Chris Prom
Associate Dean for Digital Strategies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Heidi Imker
Associate Dean for Research
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
For the past several years, the Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has been developing a mature repository service with a different approach from others on offer. Typical repository implementation efforts require technical staff to weave disparate systems (preservation services, digital libraries, institutional repositories, and archival descriptive systems) together using APIs and middleware, if at all. Curators and users, meanwhile, must use many systems to accomplish similar goals. In contrast, the underlying architecture for Illinois’ preservation repository and access system is a genuinely integrated system, with the capacity to curate and provide access to multiple types of materials. Key features include: 1) bit-level preservation and format monitoring services; 2) a metadata profiling system, allowing the application of different community metadata standards and indexing/faceting options at the collection level; 3) a streamlined model to push born-digital and digitized collections as well as research data sets to users, requiring minimal or (in some cases) no item-level metadata; 4) flexible packaging methods to display different content types in different ways; 5) bulk metadata export, import, and editing mechanisms; and 6) the potential for multi-tenancy through Amazon Web Services optimization and on-demand scaling. Current development efforts focus on bringing this architecture closer to realizing deploying a single preservation platform that allows for collection-specific curation and access interfaces while unifying digital collections management, research data management, and, eventually, institutional repository management and archival description. This talk will: 1) describe the goals and underlying philosophies driving our decision to develop this platform; 2) illustrate our existing, fully functional data repository, with a focus on how this integrated strategy afforded rapid and flexible development; and 3) request feedback from attendees on future plans to integrate institutional repository and archival management functions into the unified system.
Kyle Rimkus contributed to this presentation.
https://digital.library.illinois.edu
https://databank.illinois.edu/
https://medusa.library.illinois.edu/
