October 13th, 2016
We are pleased to announce bepress Archive, a new service that supports preservation needs for content hosted on bepress platforms. Through the service, bepress customers can now receive a real-time archive of all their content on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), an industry-standard platform that provides 99.999999999% file durability, performs checksums for data integrity checks, and uses redundant data to repair any corrupted files it finds.
Content on bepress platforms is already protected by a secure infrastructure that includes multiple backups as well as long-term storage with Amazon Glacier. With the addition of bepress Archive on Amazon S3, libraries gain their own cloud-based backup, which they control directly and can access 24/7.
The bepress Archive model addresses preservation concerns identified by the National Digital Preservation Alliance, including geographic location, file fixity, data integrity, information security, metadata, and file formats.
“Launching bepress Archive reflects our commitment to the security and longevity of scholarship, which we believe to be among any academic institution’s most crucial assets,” says bepress president and CEO, Jean-Gabriel Bankier.
Jenna Nolt, Digital Initiatives Librarian at Kenyon College, implemented bepress Archive as a response to a two-year investigation into preservation plans: “Cloud storage is becoming a bigger component of digital preservation… the benefits are having globally distributed copies of our files, direct access to our files, and a 3rd-party backup with Amazon.”
The service helps Nolt, who designated Digital Kenyon as the primary repository for data and other grant-related output, better support faculty members with the digital preservation portions of grant applications.
Nolt also commented on how simple the service was to set up: “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 Weaver, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Missouri University of Science & Technology, appreciates the ability to “quickly manipulate content in the system.”
S3 provides libraries the opportunity to use other Amazon Web Services solutions for security, alerting, and other needs. It also gives libraries another way to transfer their bepress-hosted content to third parties, including third- party preservation systems.
Big thanks to Cornell University, who piloted and tested this new service over the spring.
Founded by professors in 1999, bepress exists to help academic communities maximize the impact of their research and demonstrate their value. With Digital Commons and the growing Expert Gallery Suite, universities can collect, preserve, and showcase the full range of their intellectual output and expertise.
