Preservation
Keep your digital assets and digital collections usable over the medium to long-term—even when digital systems and file formats change.
About our preservation service
Preservation is a fully managed, SaaS, shared platform developed to support all your preservation needs.
We’ve co-designed the service with Jisc members and leading preservation systems suppliers (Artefactual and Preservica). Crucially, we’ve developed the service to support institutions with a wide variety of preservation requirements; any digital object can be preserved so the service offers benefits to all areas of your institution.
The service is interoperable with your existing systems and workflows. If your data is already stored in repositories, a current research information system (CRIS), or other data management systems, we will work with the supplier to ensure the systems work together seamlessly.
We are also working towards ISO27001 accreditation. Find out more on our certification page.
Benefits
- A managed, robust service hosted on a secure cloud-based platform
- Simpler data curation, with reliable, automated workflows that are easy for staff to use. Staff can identify and retain valuable material while disposing of obsolete data in a timely way, so they’re freed up to focus on other activities
- Reduced risk of data loss, damage or alteration when migrating metadata and digital objects into, and out of, storage systems
- It supports preservation of research where the researcher doesn’t have access to subject or funder repositories
- The service supports institutional reputation and research integrity, keeps your ERM data available and useable for auditing purposes and helps you demonstrate compliance with funder mandates on long-term availability
Why preservation?
If you’ve got robust back-up IT systems and multiple copies of digital files, or you have a repository for research outputs, you may think you’ve got preservation covered already.
With short-term file-saving solutions and one-time deposit systems files can usually be found, but their usability will deteriorate over time. That’s where a preservation policy and a preservation system come in. Together, they help to ensure digital assets are findable and usable long-term.
Preservation is an ongoing process that extends the ability to use information even beyond the lifetime of existing systems and formats.
A preservation system will ensure you fulfil your compliance obligations even when funder and publisher mandates specify that research outputs must be available for reuse for ten years or more. And it’ll allow you to play your part in national and international initiatives that promote open scholarship such as FAIR, building your institution’s reputation and extending the impact of its research and collections.
A preservation system will also help you fulfil your obligations regarding electronic records management (ERM).
Preservation can:
- Ingest selected data and metadata about any digital object, identify the necessary preservation actions and undertake them automatically
- Create archival versions of digital files and move them to long-term storage
- Undertake future preservation actions whenever they’re needed to maintain discoverability and reusability long term
- Support dissemination of research outputs by creating accessible versions and making them available as required
How to sign up
If you're interested in using our preservation service, contact your account manager or email help@jisc.ac.uk.
After you sign up we can usually get you started within a few weeks. We'll just need to gather a few details from you to customise the service, then we’ll organise an onboarding meeting with you to kickstart the process.
Watch the Preservica webinar on open APIs and digital preservation strategies: