Preserving digital content through improved EPrints repository integration with Archivematica

Recent rapid growth of open access repositories has renewed community interest in the digital preservation of these corpora, especially for scholarly and cultural reasons. The need to ensure persistence in the scholarly record is central to scholarship, facilitating citability, accessibility and verification. This contribution describes the implementation and success of integrated preservation workflows between the EPrints repository platform and Archivematica, the open source digital preservation system. Using Strathprints (the University of Strathclyde repository) as an example, the contribution describes recent development work (led by Concordia University) to develop an EPrints plugin capable of delivering Archivematica optimized exports of repository content for processing within the Archivematica preservation pipeline. The contribution provides an overview of the functionality developed, example submission information packages (SIPs) and archival information packages (AIPs) and reviews the state of experimentation at Strathclyde. Future work is also summarised. Code for the plugin is open source and available from GitHub