Digital Preservation Research and Training
The three interlocking components of digital preservation at ICPSR are research, training, and practice; each informs the other two. This Web site is devoted to ensuring that digital preservation practice at ICSPR is compliant and transparent. This section provides some examples of ICPSR's underlying commitment to exploring and developing good practices through research, and to sharing what we are doing and what we have learned through training and other forms of information sharing.
Research
Digital preservation is an emerging research area, as the digital preservation community is in the process of formalizing its membership, standards, practices, and communication networks. ICPSR is committed to engaging in digital preservation research to sustain our digital preservation program. We are also intent on extending our understanding of relevant technologies as the nature of and requirements for preserving digital content evolve and to sharing the results of our research. These are some examples of digital preservation research at ICPSR:
Data-PASS
The Data-PASS 
project
has become an umbrella initiative for exploring the means to identify, acquire, and preserve significant social science data that may be at risk.
Data-PASS has enabled partnership building with other data
archives (e.g., the Harvard-MIT Data Center, the Odum Institute,
the Roper Center, and the National Archives and Records Administration and other organizations (such as, the San Diego Supercomputing
Center and the LOCKSS
team).
Related Projects
Data-PASS has led to related projects, such as:
- IMLS funded project: Simple Verified Distributed Preservation: A Policy Based Policy Replication Using a Virual Private LOCKSS Network
- Incentives for Data Producers to Create Archive-Ready Data Sets project (PDF)
- Syndicated Storage for Social Science Data project (PDF)
ICPSR is developing a comprehensive research agenda for digital preservation and will continue to seek external research funding to achieve our goals.
Training
Digital Preservation Management Workshop
ICPSR is pleased to continue the digital preservation training program developed at Cornell University. The primary goal of this program is to enable effective
decision making for administrators who will be responsible for the longevity of digital objects in an age of technological uncertainty. The cornerstone of this program
is the Digital Preservation Management
Workshop series. The goals of the workshop are to foster
critical thinking in a technological realm and provide the means for exercising practical and responsible stewardship of digital assets. The next workshop will take
place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, on June 13-18, 2010. We will continue to provide versions of this workshop and seek funding to expand the curriculum as an ongoing contribution to the
digital preservation community.
Digital Preservation Management Tutorial
In August 2007, ICPSR became the host for the award-wining Digital Preservation Management Tutorial developed at Cornell University Library by a team led by Anne R. Kenney and Nancy Y. McGovern, the Digital Preservation officer at ICPSR. The tutorial provides an introduction to the basic tenets of digital preservation and is particularly geared toward librarians, archivists, curators, managers, and technical specialists. The tutorial can stand on its own, but has been designed to complement the workshop.
Main page of the Digital Preservation Management tutorial
Digital Preservation Presentation Series
Digital Preservation at ICPSR and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Student Chapter co-sponsored a series of lectures during the Fall of 2008. The series served as a test of the DPM Workshop curriculum and focused on practice, standards, and developments in the digital preservation community.
