OCUL is pleased to announce that the Permafrost hosted digital preservation service is set to become Scholars Portal’s newest subscription-based service.
Permafrost offers a suite of tools, training and resources to enable OCUL members to process, preserve, and give access to their valuable digital assets for the long-term. The service pairs open source tools including Archivematica, a popular tool for preservation processing, with the Ontario Library Research Cloud for storage, in addition to hands-on training and documentation to enable OCUL members to confidently process and store digital archival and library materials.
Details on the service are available at permafrost.scholarsportal.info.
Permafrost was collaboratively developed on a pilot basis beginning with Lakehead University Library in January 2017. A second phase from September 2017 to April 2018 added four more OCUL members: the University of Waterloo Library, Wilfrid Laurier University Library, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology Library; and the University of Toronto Libraries via the University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services unit. Materials processed during the pilot include digitized audio recordings, documents and images from university collections and born-digital fonds. The Lakehead University Archives processed several born-digital components of fonds, including accessions to the Age Friendly Giants fonds and the David Belrose fonds. Lakehead University Archives is also using Permafrost to preserve digitized images from a variety of fonds.
Permafrost will be made available to interested OCUL members on a subscription basis beginning in September 2018. OCUL members are now invited to express interest in joining the service. Please contact us via the form at permafrost.scholarsportal.info or e-mail us at permafrost@scholarsportal.info