Peerless Preservation for Harvard’s Open-Access Repository

The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication and Harvard University Archives are pleased to announce two initiatives for state-of-the-art digital preservation of Harvard’s open-access research. The first initiative is for electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Harvard now has a full-scale program to manage the submission, preservation, and enhanced access to its electronic theses and dissertations. Harvard ETDs are open access in DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), the open-access repository maintained by OSC. Record copies of the same ETDs are preserved by the Harvard University Archives, the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, and the Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.   Long-term preservation of ETDs is provided by the Digital Repository Service (DRS) which offers a set of professionally managed services to ensure the usability of securely stored digital objects over time. DRS is jointly managed by the Harvard Library Preservation, Conservation, and Digital Imaging division and Library Technology Services (LTS) in HUIT ... The second initiative goes beyond ETDs to peer-reviewed scholarly articles and other scholarly content. Now that Harvard has built a channel to preserve DASH content in DRS, starting with ETDs, it plans to preserve the rest of DASH in DRS as well. Today DASH contains nearly 20,000 peer-reviewed scholarly articles. While the first ETDs will begin flowing from DASH to DRS in the winter of 2014, scholarly articles will start flowing in the same direction soon after.  Peter Suber, Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication, commented, 'I’m proud that Harvard’s open-access repository is one of the first to take advantage of a state-of-the-art digital preservation system. Open-access repositories take more steps toward preservation than most web sites, but not as many as top-end services like DRS. I welcome this chance to combine open access and serious preservation in one collaborative solution.'"