Binding & Finishing
Conservation & Book Repair
Media Preservation

Digital Preservation
Collections of literary manuscripts acquired by SULAIR's Department of Special Collections increasingly include electronic records. Similarly, it is not uncommon for items from the libraries' general collections, particularly in the subject areas of math and the sciences, to include digital media components, such as diskettes and CD-ROMs.

As a result of an active collection development program in the history of science and technology, particularly in its efforts to document the development of Silicon Valley business and research centers, Stanford University Libraries has extensive holdings of software, hardware, and born-digital documents of all kinds recorded onto various media.

The challenges of preserving and providing access to these records are complex. Media Preservation staff members work to devise feasible and suitable strategies so that electronic records of enduring value are identified, their technical characteristics and requirements are assessed and documented, and preservation actions, such as migration and refreshment, can be planned or implemented accordingly. We also work hard to stay abreast of the latest research on common digital media, such as CDs and DVDs, the factors influencing digital media longevity and digital file accessibility, relevant standards, and industry trends.

The Stanford Digital Repository
As the Digital Library Program flourishes, SULAIR is faced with managing terabytes, and soon petabytes, of digital information in multiple forms. Work is underway to design and build an OAIS-compliant digital repository, which utilizes TEAMS digital asset management software, to serve two crucial roles for the Stanford research community:

• to provide discovery mechanisms for conducting integrated searches across SULAIR digital resources
• to preserve the bits which make up these resources while maintaining essential contextual information which facilitates their understanding and use.

Preservation staff are actively involved in the planning and development of the technical and administrative infrastructure to support the digital repository and its services. Key areas of work include:

• establishing institutional standards governing the quality of digital assets to be archived in the repository
• formulating the set of preservation metadata elements to be used to manage digital resources of all kinds
• devising a scheme for use in managing whole classes of digital objects with differing lifecyles.

More information on metadata at SULAIR can be found at: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ts/tsdepts/cat/units/metadata/docs/.