In this case study, Ruth Hegarty, Managing Editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s (RIA) publishing house, reflects on how the Publications department at the RIA has adapted to digitally preserve open-access research data using DRI’s flexible ingest pathways. This case study particularly highlights the vulnerability of physically published legacy materials – and suggests methodologies to develop preservation pathways.
Irish institutions across the education, culture, and public service sectors hold vast quantities of physically published legacy materials which have not been made available openly or to the public and wider research community.
Many research institutions do not have the capacity to perform long-term digital preservation on digitised legacy materials items such as: books, maps, manuscripts, and photographs. Recent research has identified challenges relating to time, funding, and an absence of national digitisation policies as critical steps needed to create a sea change to provide long term access to heritage materials.
Experts further recommend that reviewing and constantly updating organisational standards are essential for the progress of digital preservation projects in any country.
Says Ruth Hegarty, RIA Publications:
“The DRI relieve us of the responsibility for long-term preservation of our work. Their expertise and ability to train us to get started has been essential to ensure that we can archive safe in the knowledge that we’ve given the right file formats with the right metadata. The system is flexible, allowing us to build collections that suit our needs, whether that’s for a book with the underlying research archive to accompany it, or an exhibition or an entire research project’s multimedia publications.”
Ruth also uses this case study to discuss RIA Publications and their data management approach as well as new workflows used to integrate the DRI as part of the publishing process – complementing traditional routes to publication via printed book and e-books in different platforms.
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