We’ve been busy fielding calls since introducing bepress Archive in May, talking about solutions for preservation plans, supporting grants, and more. As a quick refresher, the service partners with Amazon to give schools more flexible options for preserving their content. While bepress doesn’t charge for the service, customers are required to create their own Amazon S3 accounts. We caught up with a couple administrators who are already using the service to get their perspectives.
For the past two years, Jenna Nolt at Kenyon College has been exploring what it would take to set up a preservation plan for the library, and has participated in a digital preservation task force with the Digital Collaborations Group of the Five Colleges of Ohio. For Jenna, the introduction of bepress Archive came at the perfect time. She explains, “Cloud storage is becoming a bigger component of digital preservation. For me, the benefits are having globally distributed copies of our files, direct access to our files, and a 3rd-party backup with Amazon.”
While Jenna was primarily looking for backup for her entire IR, bepress Archive also helps with another role that she plays in the library: supporting faculty with grant applications. Jenna helps faculty write the digital preservation portions of grant applications, and has worked with other offices at Kenyon to designate Digital Kenyon as the primary repository for data and other grant-related output. The additional layer of security provided by bepress Archive strengthens the case that she is able to make with funders.
Roger Weaver at Missouri University of Science and Technology has another specific use for the service. While MST maintains TIFF copies of their content on their own servers in addition to the DC platform, bepress Archive lets him “quickly manipulate content in the system” in a way he couldn’t otherwise.
Both Jenna and Roger commented on the ease of set-up and the affordable cost. Jenna said, “I didn’t know it, but Kenyon already had an S3 account, so once I spoke to my IT department, they were able to give me the required information very quickly. Overall it took five days from when I brought this to bepress to getting the archive set up.” Roger pointed out that the service is significantly cheaper than other options, saying “I couldn’t believe it; I think I paid less than $10 for my last monthly bill.”
We’ve had quite a few conversations about bepress Archive and are looking forward to more. If you are in the process of developing a digital preservation plan for your campus, have a special use case to share, or just want to learn more about the service, please contact outreach@bepress.com.