Digital Preservation Resources For Higher Education

Those of us that are already active in digital preservation know that there are many excellent resources for beginners (and experts) out there, but, as is often the case with people starting in a new relatively strange activity, they can be difficult to find for newcomers. If you’re not in the know, if you don’t know how to describe or label what you’re looking for then it can be very frustrating. This frustration can be exacerbated when terminology that has multiple (often subtly) different definitions across domains is employed. Every community has its own glossary and jargon and there will often be a need for a ‘bi-lingual’third party to translate from one domain to another. And that’s where Jisc comes in. We at Jisc are a membership organisation. Our core membership lies within the higher education and further education sectors. So, although we do undertake a wide range of activities in many different sectors, we are (unsurprisingly) very much focused on the needs of our core education members. Part of the remit of the Content and Discovery group within Jisc is to help our members with advice and guidance around digital preservation. With that in mind we are acting as the “bi-lingual third party”and are currently compiling a list of available resources that are of particular interest to /useful for the education sector. We speak education/research AND preservation. We’re currently at the literature review / gap analysis stage and this lightning talk is intended to provide an overview of the resources identified to date, how they are of particular use to the education sector, describe any perceived gaps, and outline what might be done about those gaps (and by whom). We intend to use this information to present about more rounded education focused resource at a future conference.