[Dspace-general] Preservation and presentation formats

[Michele Huston]

Hi all,

At ANU we are looking at placing collections of images, audio and XML docs into DSpace. These files raise the issue of different formats for preservation and access.

e.g. 1 Our images are in tiff format and we have generated jpeg derivatives (e.g. thumbnail and a larger web view) for display. Our thinking is that it would be better to store the derivatives in a structured files space elsewhere rather than bundled with the tiffs as they are not archive quality and we may want to regenerated them or serve them on the fly in the future. We have made some minor changes to the DSpace user interface to allow the thumbnails and the enlarged view to display.

e.g. 2 Our audio files are in wav format and the access format we are using is real audio (streaming). Again our plan is to store the real audio files separate from the wav files. We don't want to archive the access formats as it is very likely that we will want to change this format in the future.

e.g. 3 In the case of the XML docs we'd like to allow the user to choose between HTML and PDF and to generate these derivatives on the fly.

We were wondering if anyone else has been exploring the issue of separation of the preservation and display functions in DSpace.

Regards

Michele

Michele Huston
Digital Resource Services
The Australian National University
Ph 02 6125 6659
michele.huston at anu.edu.au