EPrints is at ECDL co-running a preservation workshop with the Planets project.

We’ve covered a lot of the theory of preservation, and have also done some practical exercises showing the forthcoming EPrints 3.2 features that assist with the preservation agenda.

Firstly we had them playing with the new storage layer. This enables repositories to control the locations in which files are stored. We covered how to set storage policies, report on how many files were in each supported storage area (local, cloud, etc), and copy items between locations.

The second set of exercises covered preservation file format risk assessment. EPrints 3.2 can keep track of and report on the preservation risk status of the content (assuming a sensibly configured repository). Migration of ‘at risk’ formats could be done automatically, but that’s still in the future…

The slides and EPrints exercises are available here.

It’s been a great day. An active bunch of attendees who had lots of questions were really enthusiastic about the subject.