Rice University

Preserving and archiving the digital resources at Rice University’s Fondren Library is a huge undertaking. Their Center for Digital Scholarship has been active for more than a decade, and its holdings are expanding rapidly. The library has been doing backup and limited geographic distribution of selected digital collections, but has concerns about how smoothly that has been going and the robustness of the overall approach, says Geneva Henry, Executive Director of Rice’s Center for Digital Scholarship. DuraCloud promises to solve the problem because its user interface is far simpler than those that Rice had been using. Another advantage is that DuraCloud automatically packages items in DSpace repositories like the one Rice uses. “DuraCloud is a scalable, cloud-based preservation solution for repositories that also supports a number of additional services,” says Henry. She adds that DuraCloud should be especially convenient for users who do not have the capacity to provide media streaming, image transformation, and other services on their own.