Charting the Future: ICPSR's 20+ Years of Digital Preservation and Beyond
Jared Lyle Mike Shallcross
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest social science data repository, developed its formal digital preservation program ~20 years ago, around the same time as the start of the iPRES conference.  While ICPSR had conducted preservation activities since its founding in 1962, it conscientiously professionalized and standardized digital preservation work after the recommendation of a 2004 external process review committee report.

This poster reviews the 20 years of digital preservation progress at ICPSR, especially highlighting upcoming funded work to modernize processes and technology to better align with responsibilities for Trustworthy Digital Repositories specified in ISO 14721 (Open Archival Information System Reference Model) and in ISO 16363 (Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories).  Upcoming work includes:

**Data Provenance Information**: improvement of ICPSR’s ability to track preservation actions performed on digital objects across the curation lifecycle, from deposit as Submission Information Packages through storage as Archival Information Packages. This effort includes improved documentation of relationships between original files and their associated preservation and access copies.


**File Format Identification**: integration of tools that make use of the PRONOM format registry to provide more granular and accurate information regarding the file formats of deposited data. In the case of data formats where PRONOM contains limited information or is unable to distinguish between format versions (e.g., SAS, SPSS, STATA, etc.), ICPSR intends to contribute format signature information for the benefit of the research data community.


**Technical Metadata Extraction**: expand the range of format-specific technical metadata collected by ICPSR (e.g., as defined by community resources such as the FADGI Significant Properties for Digital Video) so that this information can be made available to users (to assist with the evaluation and selection of content of interest) as well as staff (to assist with risk mediation and preservation planning).


**Metadata Interoperability**: development of a new API that will allow essential descriptive and administrative metadata about ICPSR data collections to be exported in established standards (e.g., DCAT-US, MARCXML, DDI-Codebook, Dublin Core, schema.org, etc.) to promote discovery, catalog integration, and (eventually) content transfer.
approaches to preservation start 2 preserve