Keith Johnson
Product Manager, Stanford Digital Repository
Stanford University
The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) are building a set of services to facilitate long-term stewardship of information encoded in digital form. These services and the infrastructure supporting them are collectively called the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR), and are envisioned to support not only the institutional scholarly needs of Stanford, but also the world’s broader academic and research communities. The broadly defined scope of the SDR requires it to accommodate large volumes of widely heterogeneous content; in the emerging digital preservation field this creates significant challenges. One of the most considerable is identifying commonalities in the preservation service needs of the heterogeneous objects to build broadly valuable and viable services. To this end, SDR staff have been surveying existing digital preservation theory, participating in funded digital preservation research, investigating the nature and scope of extant digital information at Stanford, and investigating traditional preservation and archival practices. This briefing will present theory synthesized by SDR staff to model our digital preservation economics and the implications of this theory on the emerging services and longer-term design of the SDR.
Handout (MS Word)
