The Future of Preservation: Reinventing the Repository at Harvard

The DRS Futures project is a multi-year effort to re-envision and revitalize Harvard Library’s preservation environment with expanded functionality, reliability, and sustainability. The project has followed a three-phased approach of initial open-ended envisioning of an ideal repository, subsequent specification of an achievable repository, and final deployment of an operational repository. This work aims to replace the Digital Repository Service (DRS) that Harvard Library has maintained for 25 years as a highly customized homegrown preservation system. Although subject to continual enhancement over time, the DRS has now reached the effective limits of its conceptual design and operational capacity and needs to go through a generational modernization. The Library set a high benchmark for project success in terms of ten aspirational goals for support of “any” content, conditions, users, and uses. In a departure from traditional enterprise procurement practice, the project also adopted a framework of ten “radical” transformative work principles. This framework and the insights gained from Harvard's initiative provide useful examples for other institutions considering similar programmatic change.