TIPR: Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories

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The task of preserving our digital heritage for future generations far exceeds the capacity of any government or institution. Responsibility must be distributed across a number of stewardship organizations running heterogeneous and geographically dispersed digital preservation repositories. For reasons of redundancy, succession planning and software migration, these repositories must be able to exchange copies of archived information packages with each other. Practical repository-to-repository transfer will require a common, standards-based transfer format capable of transporting rich preservation metadata as well as digital objects, and repository systems must be capable of exporting and importing information packages utilizing this format.

The TIPR project, which ran from October 2008 through September 2011, developed and tested a model for repository-to-repository tranfer. The goals of the project were to:

demonstrate the feasibility of repository-to-repository transfer of rich archival information packages;
advance the state of the art by identifying and resolving issues that impede such transfers;
develop a usable, standards-based transfer format, building on prior work;
disseminate these results to the international preservation community and the relevant standards activities.

The three TIPR partners run three technically heterogeneous, geographically distributed digital preservation repositories. Cornell University Library runs CUL-OAIS originally based on aDORe, later Fedora. New York University Libraries' Preservation Repository is based on DSpace, and FCLA's Florida Digital Archive uses DAITSS. The TIPR partners:

designed a shared transfer format based on METS and PREMIS schemas;
enhanced each of their preservation repository systems to support import and export of this information;
tested the actual transfer of processed and enriched archival information packages between the three repository systems.

TIPR was funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Last modified 23 December 2011 at 2:34 pm by Priscilla Caplan