Dell and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Create Preservation Archive

Working with Dell, Inc., the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has
created a new digital archive for its university system that simplifies how it
manages digital assets, including rare books and faculty intellectual property
output such as research documents, papers and lectures content typically
produced in multiple digital formats.

The new archive reduces storage costs and streamlines the management, retention
and protection of scholarly works through a solution based on the Dell DX
Object Storage Platform and DuraSpace Open
Source Fedora Commons Repository Software. Critical for the university was the
ability to meet today s needs and to scale efficiently over time as digital
content evolves and grows.

Explosive data growth and large data sets make it more difficult for libraries,
museums and government organizations to preserve and protect
documents, multimedia content and digital assets for future generations. As one
of the largest public university libraries in the world, the Library at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign manages the intellectual property
and digital content created by faculty, administrators and students – from
one-of-a-kind, fragile books that can create 600 to 800 image objects once
digitized, to retiring professors collections of work over a 20- to 25-year
tenure.

After considering its digital archive and retention goals, the
University of Illinois customized a version of Fedora Repository Software and
combined it with the DX Object Storage Platform. The platform
replicates an archive master and a working master of each file to simplify
backup, storing one copy on the University’s main library cluster and a second
copy in its engineering library. In the future, a third copy will be archived
in the cloud to further simplify data access and sharing across the University
system.

The DX Platform also produces metadata to manage the archive, identifying
files that need to be transitioned from older to newer digital formats for
future generations. And the DX Object Storage Platform’s plug and play
framework lets archivists add additional retention capacity to the digital
archive as it is needed.

John
Mullen, VP, education and state and local government, Dell, said: "With
the transition from stacks and the Dewey Decimal system to bytes, clusters and
metadata, academic libraries need a digital archiving strategy that addresses
their immediate and future needs. The University of Illinois’ innovative and
open approach to this challenge is a practical model for any university."

Thomas
Habing, research programmer, R&D, University of Illinois at Urbana at
Champaign Library, said: "This
opportunity provides us with extra resources to further the development of the
Library’s digital preservation archive. It also allows us to continue to
utilize Open Source Fedora Commons Repository Software while at the same time
employing a commercially-supported object storage platform with many digital
preservation features, such as replication and validation, which we will not
need to implement ourselves. Plus, we can share all of our development efforts
back to the open source community which helps everyone, including Dell."

Michele
Kimpton, CEO of DuraSpace, said: "The
Open Source Fedora repository platform is used by more than 400 institutions
around the globe. We believe commercial implementations, such as Dell, provide
our users with the best of both worlds – hardware and services from a
large-scale commercial vendor integrated with open source software, Fedora
Repository. The total package provides users with greater transparency and
durability in the long run."