Packaging Content for Aggregated and Federated Repositories through APTrust

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track Papers and Panels

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/p1txjdy74ts/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:16:58)

The Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) provides an aggregated cloud-based bit level preservation repository for institutional content. It also serves as a first node in the Digital Preservation Network (DPN). By providing a format and repository agnostic submission packaging strategy, it is able to accept content of any type for digital preservation and helps to establish a layer of abstraction for digital objects that maintain references, allow for distributed health checks, and set the stage for relating content across other preservation systems. Digital Object health checks involve confirmation fixity against hashes generated both by the original contributor and by APTrust itself to provide a strong chain of custody. As a format agnostic repository, a larger burden is placed on content packaging and preparation to ensure interoperability and easy restoration, but once a lightweight method is established, it has great utility for maintaining the portability of objects across the preservation ecosystem as well as for restoration.