A digital library for the University of York

Abstract

The University of York has recently launched a project to set-up a multimedia repository service for the University’s research resources, both those produced out of and used within research. This project is being given a kick-start by funding from the JISC repositories and preservation programme start-up and enhancement strand, under the name ‘SAFIR’ (Sound Archive Film Image Repository). Institutional repositories are growing in number within the UK and offer a variety of services, such as asset management, dissemination, preservation. For multimedia, research data and other resources, institutional-level stewardship is quite new. Often such resources are managed, or mismanaged, on a Departmental or personal level, or alternatively by large data centres and data archives. With the possible demise of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), York is among institutions faced with a duty to find a safe, secure and long-term home for a large collection of image materials. We would like to submit a poster to Open Repositories 2008 to cover some of the challenges we face in building a repository for non-text resources.