Stanford Digital Repository

The SDR has recently been investigating open source storage solutions that include the ability to efficiently and securely preserve multiple-version digital objects which contain large binary files. This research follows up on previous discussions of versioning approaches on the Digital-Curation mailing list and at recent CurateCamps. Attached is a report containing an overview and summary of findings in MS Word, Acrobat, and Powerpoint formats, along with 3 detailed reports with details of my analysis of ReDD, Git, and Boar approaches.

A few years ago, the University of Michigan, Indiana University, and the rest of the CIC announced their plans for preserving and making accessible the books in their collections that had been digitized by Google. The concept is an ambitious digital library named "The Shared Digital Repository." This announcement caught the attention of Stanford Libraries, since we too, as one of the original Google Books partners, were actively engaged in plans to manage and provide access to our widely expanding digitized collection.

In May of this year, the Stanford Digital Repository accomplished another first: a complete media migration.

What do we mean by “media migration”? Media migration involves making copies of stored digital files onto new storage media. Because storage media – like CDs, DVDs, hard drives, and digital tape – have short useful lifetimes and are subject to failure, media migration is one of the more fundamental operations of a digital archive.