Beyond the Repository: Integrating Local Preservation Systems with National Distribution Services | Northwestern University

"Executive Summary: The “Beyond the Repository” planning grant investigated how local digital preservation practices and repository systems interoperate with distributed digital preservation (DDP) services. The grant team conducted a survey followed by in-depth interviews with selected survey respondents. The survey and interviews revealed both great diversity in how digital preservation is practiced and common challenges in the intersection of local repositories and DDP services.

The survey received 170 complete responses from a variety of organizations. Seventy-seven percent of respondents self-identified as academic institutions, but representatives from archives, government organizations, museums, non-profit organizations, and public libraries also responded to the survey. Survey respondents were nearly evenly split between those that identified as an administrator or department/unit head and those that identified as staff. The vast majority of survey respondents - 90% - reported that their institution had collected more than a terabyte of unique digital content, and 63% reported having collected fifty terabytes or less. Survey respondents reported using a variety of digital preservation and repository systems to manage their content; no one system was used by a clear majority of respondents.

The survey data reveals that most respondents (84%) are storing copies of their unique content in multiple locations...."