A Tale of Two Collaborations: Digital Commons, Digital Preservation, and Digital Special Collections at GVSU

Bepress continues to demonstrate that the Digital Commons platform provides a highly flexible, adaptable, and interoperable institutional repository solution. Over the past year, librarians and staff at Grand Valley State University have explored the limits and extent of that flexibility and interoperability, through two related collaborations at the intersection of digital preservation and curation, archival administration, and repository management. Our first project emerged when bepress enabled Digital Commons subscribers to back up their institutional repository content systematically to their own locally supported Amazon S3 instances. With increased curatorial control over a backup copy of our content and related metadata, we began working with S3 and other open source technologies to provide a preservation pathway for this content. In a parallel collaboration, we evaluated our Digital Commons platform as an affordable long-term access solution for digitized and born-digital archival content in our existing preservation systems, comparing Digital Commons to commercial and open source archival management platforms. In this presentation, we will discuss the workflows involved, and share insights and lessons learned from these new use cases and collaborations