What is the Digital Archive service?

Definition of the Digital Archive Function and Activity

The Digital Archive at the University of Edinburgh encompasses unique and valuable digital resources that, based on archival appraisal principles and practices, are selected for long term preservation due to evidential, legal, contextual or information value.  These resources underpin the University’s corporate memory and provide a wider understanding of University activities, background, events, knowledge or connections with communities locally, nationally and internationally.

Scope

Digital collecting follows the University’s collecting policies. The Digital Archive maintains the ‘golden copy’ of transferred materials, and therefore unique, authentic and authoritative collections of digital records, in a variety of formats, providing continuity with physical collections and priorities for collecting.

While the Digital Archive exclusively accepts digital materials for permanent retention and therefore may eventually intake data or materials from other University repositories, in the short term (approximately 7 years) and sometimes medium term (approximately 30 years), digital resources are stored in other reliable repositories across L&UC.

The Digital Archive is part of a suite of digital preservation activities across the University, which includes repositories purpose-built to store and preserve particular types of data (such as DataShare for open research data) with their own particular requirements.

Deliverables

The Digital Archive will:

• Preserve authoritative and authentic born-digital and made-digital content selected in line with collecting policies
• Provide access to digital archives for research, learning, and teaching
• Safeguard the University’s corporate memory and continue the University’s archive from the physical to the digital
• Collect digital content that is archival, and which will support teaching, learning and research, such as personal papers, records of businesses or organisations, societies and charities

Business Processes or Systems

The Digital Archive uses various tools and systems to analyse and manage digital resources. The main systems used to apply preservation actions and manage standards-compliant preservation storage include:

• Archivematica to analyse bit-level information and generate AIPs (Archival Information Packages)
• Archipelago to store the Digital Preservation Registry (including preservation metadata) for on-going management of AIPs
• ArchivesSpace to manage metadata and to enable research discovery

In line with digital preservation good practice, these systems are all open source and sustainable, developed through collaboration between users and developers.

The Digital Archive uses additional tools when necessary for activities such as verified transfer, integrity checking, appraisal, and file format migration, the majority of which are also open source.

Schedule and Service Levels

The Digital Archive actively manages resources accessioned into the University Archives in adherence with the Digital Preservation Policy (2025) and digital preservation good practices. Staff continuously review preserved archives to ensure ongoing authenticity and integrity, such as through monitoring for obsolescence and bit-level fixity. New transfers (University records) and donations (external resources) are processed through continuously reviewed workflows, from initiation with record creator or owner, file transfer, checks and validation, accessioning, appraisal, migration, cataloguing and preservation.