Digital Preservation

Strategy and Roadmaps

The University of Melbourne generates and maintains considerable digital collections of enduring value. This includes the University’s digital research output, research data and records, University records and cultural collections.

The amount of digital product generated continues to grow, while expectations around preservation and access to the University’s digital product – particularly research product – are also changing: driven largely by the evolving expectations of researchers, funders and the broader academic community.

In response to these challenges, the University has developed its digital preservation strategy with a vision to make the University’s digital product of enduring value available into the future. The strategy was developed with input from the Academy and in collaboration with key University stakeholders including the Library, Melbourne Research and ITS.

The University of Melbourne Digital Preservation Strategy

The Digital Preservation roadmaps outline the goals and actions required to address the University’s strategy for research data and records, and research outputs. The three phases of the Roadmaps are iterative, and require the development of individual business cases for requesting funding.

Implementation Roadmaps

Principles

The Digital Preservation takes into account four principles:

1. Promoting a Culture that values and supports the preservation of digital materials
2. Investing in high quality Infrastructure – both human and technological infrastructure
3. Developing Policy that provides clear guidance to all stakeholders
4. Enabling an Organisation with a shared commitment to retain digital materials

Australasia Preserves

Australasia Preserves is a digital preservation community of practice for Australia, New Zealand, and the broader Australasian region. Community activities cover varied interests and areas of working with digitised and born-digital materials, encouraging participation and input from a wide variety of people and organisations, including libraries, archives, records, IT, government, and universities. The community was formed in February 2018 following the success of the inaugural meeting at the University of Melbourne, Australia. This meeting was organised by the University of Melbourne Scholarly Services Digital Stewardship (Research) team. Details of the first Australasia Preserves can be found here.

Illustration by Matthew Burgess (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Contacts

For more information please contact us .