Digital Preservation: Digital Preservation @ VT

For more detailed information about our department, visit the Digital Imaging & Preservation Services site.

For all of the Virginia Tech Digital Libraries Platform policies, See the Digital Library Policy and Documentation site.

The purpose of our preservation system is to preserve all digital assets produced by the Viriginia Tech Libraries, which largely includes scholarly communications and content produced in library projects.

Scholarly communication examples include:

• ETDs
• BTDs
• Published works, including articles, essays, books, collaborations, etc.
• White papers
• Conference materials, including posters and presentations
• Data sets
• Digital Videos, such as Event Capture files
• Other scanned images

Digitized content examples include:

• Digitized objects, such as scanned or photocopied images
• Born-digital objects, such as text files or excel files

Specific repositories include:

• VTechWorks (including Special Collection and Event Capture)
• VTechData
• Odyssey
• Image Base

Nathan Hall: Associate Director of Digital Imaging and Preservation Services

Alex Kinnaman: Digital Preservation Coordinator

Luke Menzies: Digital Preservation Technologist

The Imaging & Preservation Department is a part of the Research & Informatics Department and collaborates with several other departments, sub-departments, studios, and groups regularly, including:

• Data Management & Curation
• Data Transformation Studio
• Digital Libraries & Repositories
• Special Collections
• Scholarly Communication
• Information Technology Services

This is a  diagram of the Digital Library Platform (DLP) for content at Virginia Tech University Libraries. This process is managed by the the Digital Libraries Department. Content produced by Clients and Content Managers is ingested into the DLP, where additional metadata is added to the metadata repository, identifiers are minted, checksums are calculated, and derivatives are created. The AIP is transferred to our local AWS instance, our local backup in Azure, and to one of our distributed preservation services. The DIP is transferred to our access platform. 

See all of the related policy at the Digital Library Policy and Documentation site.

Storage

Our primary storage is in Amazon Web Services S3. Objects are replicated into our local, secondary preservation storage in Microsoft Azure. 

Virginia Tech is a member of both MetaArchive and Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust). Both organizations are aimed at long-term digital preservation storage, maintenance, and security. 

MetaArchive is an organization consisting of various libraries, universities, and other institutions geared towards long-term preservation. Their storage is based on LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) caches, based at Stanford University. Archival units that VT controls on behalf of other institutions are ingested into MetaArchive.

APTrust is a consortium consisting of various higher education institutions for the purpose of preserving academic content and is based at the University of Virginia. 

See more information on our internal Storage Service through AWS.

Web Crawling

Archive-It is a web archiving service developed by Internet Archive that web crawls Virginia Tech's presence biannually. See our Web Archiving Program and the Web Archiving LibGuide for more information.

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As of January 2021:

• We just began the CoreTrustSeal application process and aim to have an application by June 2021
• An updated preservation policy for the Digital Library Platform is under development

World Digital Preservation Day 2020 Virtual Event

• November 5th, 2020, 4pm - 5pm
• Lightning talks
• VT preservation overview
• PDN info

• VTechWorks
• VTechData
• Odyssey
• Special Collections Online
• Southwest Virginia Digital Library
• Imaging Collections
• Various DH sites