Digital Preservation Services

As a trusted steward of the scholarly record, University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) is committed to preserving the digital content of enduring value for long-term access. UAL’s digital preservation initiatives exhibit a commitment towards undertaking digital preservation activities to the best of its ability and with the explicit goal of ensuring long-term access of the digital assets under its stewardship. UAL offers numerous services to address the digital preservation needs of the university community.

Digital Repository Services

The University of Alberta Libraries develop and support digital repository infrastructure for access and preservation of born-digital materials. Our repositories include:

• ERA: Education & Research Archive, the University of Alberta's institutional repository
• ERA Audio + Video, a multimedia repository and streaming service
• Dataverse, a data repository that helps researchers publish, analyze, distribute and share their data and datasets

For more information about our different digital repository services, please visit: https://library.ualberta.ca/research-support/era.

Web Archiving Services

University of Alberta Libraries provides web archiving services to address the increasing demand for capturing sites in support of the University’s needs for research, teaching, library collection building. University of Alberta Libraries is using the web archiving service Archive-It to capture and preserve at-risk web content. In particular, content that is of a local nature, or pertaining to western Canada, has been a focus.

See the sites and collections that have been archived by the University of Alberta at: https://archive-it.org/organizations/401

Content Recovery Services

University of Alberta Libraries runs a Digital Archaeology lab with multiple computer platforms, including a forensic workstation, a variety of media drives, and current and legacy softwares for the purpose of recovering digital content from noncurrent environments. The lab staff develop protocols and procedures for dealing with legacy media and formats. University of Alberta Libraries staff will be the primary users of the lab, but the UofA community in general can also get benefit from the services offered through this lab.

Digital Preservation Consultation Services

University of Alberta Libraries provides consultation services to aid with digital preservation related activities. These services include advice and guidance for preserving digital content, guidelines about the creation of digital content suitable for long-term preservation, help with accessing old digital content using migration and emulation tools and assistance with content recovery from old or damaged media.

Collaborative Preservation Efforts:

UAL is an active partner in several collaborative preservation efforts including:

• LOCKSS PLN (COPPUL PLN, CGI DPN, Gov Docs PLN, PKP PLN, GLN)
• CLOCKSS
• Canadian Polar Data Network