The University of Maryland Libraries routinely engage in digital preservation activities as part of their normal operations, in order to ensure long-term preservation and access to digital resources of significance for our community. Some of our normal digital preservation activities, services, and partnerships include:
The Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM) collects, preserves, and provides public access to the scholarly output of the university. Faculty and researchers can upload research products for rapid dissemination, global visibility and impact, and long-term preservation. DRUM is also the home for the University's Electronic Theses and Dissertations.
The UMD Libraries are a founding member of the Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust), a consortium of institutions committed to providing a preservation repository for digital content, and collaboratively develop services related to that content based at the University of Virginia.
As legacy media formats become obsolete, the Libraries strive to reformat materials in their collections to ensure their preservation and continued usability. These materials might be digitized in house (in the Hornbake Digitization Center) or through vendors, and are made available in our digital collections repositories, either to the campus community or to the general public. Digitized materials include books, newspapers, manuscripts, archival materials, and audiovisual content, among others.
The Libraries’ special collections and archives include and routinely appraise, acquire, and preserve born-digital records: material that has existed in digital form since it was created. Born-digital materials include documents, photographs, publications, audiovisual material, archived websites, and many other formats. They often arrive at the Libraries through removable media (floppy disks, CDs and DVDs, flash drives, hard drives, and more) or via networked storage. Born-digital records often arrive mixed in with paper records or with material that isn’t fully relevant to the collection scope.
Curators acquire these records according to their respective collection policies. The Electronic Records Archivist consults on acquisitions, evaluates and prepares records for preservation and access, and manages long-term storage of born-digital collections. Accessioning and processing archivists create finding aids, or guides to collections, that include born-digital contents.
Browse and search UMD Libraries’ archival collections
The Libraries save archived copies of websites under a mandate to archive records of the University, with the creators' permission, or under a claim of fair use for educational and research purposes.
Library staff use several methods of web archiving. One method is web crawlers that start from a specific website, or “seed” URL. As they save the code for that seed, crawlers look for hyperlinks within site content and follow the trail of links, page after page. The “scope” of a crawl can be adjusted to include or exclude specific types of documents or data.
Crawler-based web archiving doesn’t always capture dynamic elements of websites, whether server-side or client-side, including sites with responsive, database-driven, or animated features. Software such as ArchiveWeb.Page can better capture sites with these features.
