This presentation was delivered by DRI interim director Dr. Lisa Griffith as part of Love Data Week in University College Dublin (UCD) research community on 15th February 2023.

1. The Digital Repository of Ireland:
Digital Preservation and Research Sustainability
Wednesday 15 February 2023, University College Dublin
Dr Lisa Griffith
l.griffith@ria.ie

2. Digital Preservation
Digital content is at risk from a variety of threats from
bit rot to digital obsolescence, speed of technological
changes, to version changes (British Library)
Bit rot, or data degradation, is the deterioration of
digital content over time.
‘Digital preservation is the active management of digital
content over time to ensure its ongoing access.’ (Library
of Congress)
DRI is a Repository for the long term preservation of
digital objects- digitised material and born digital
content

3. The Digital Repository of Ireland
- CoreTrustSeal Certified
- Domain- specific: Culture, Heritage, Humanities and Social Science
- Material relating to the island of Ireland
- DRI is funded by the Department of Further and Higher Education,
Research, Innovation and Science (DFHERIS) via the Higher Education
Authority (HEA) and the Irish Research Council (IRC)
- The path to ingest (or preserving in the Repository) is through
Membership
- We have 46 members (including UCD)

4. Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reuseable
F
A
I
R
Is the data easy for both humans and computers to find?
persistent identifier
rich metadata
indexed in a searchable resource.
Once the user finds the required data, can they access it?
mediated without specialised or proprietary tools or communication methods
provide the exact conditions under which the data are accessible
Can the data be integrated with other data?
formal, accessible, shared language for
knowledge representation
references to other (meta)data
Is the data reproducible?
adequate context
accurate and relevant attributes
clear and accessible data usage licence
detailed provenance
Adapted from Bishop, B. W., & Hank, C. (2018). Measuring FAIR principles to inform fitness for use.

5. The Repository
https://dri.ie/
https://repository.dri.ie/

6. Research data can take many forms:
textual data
audio files
audiovisual files
numerical tables
survey or questionnaire
responses
interviews (recordings,
transcripts)
images (born-digital or digitized,
moving or still)
geospatial information
content or thematic analyses
artists’ notes
genomic information
… etc!

7. Richard Fitzpatrick. (2022) St. Kieran's
College, Kilkenny, Class Portraits and
Student Records Digitisation Project 2021,
Digital Repository of Ireland [Distributor],
Royal Irish Academy [Depositing
Institution],
https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.xg94xg33g
Research collections

8. Repository functionality

9. Repository functionality
- Citation tool
- Takes ORCID id
- IIIF viewer
- Aggregate (add
collections) to
Europeana
- Crowdsourcing
transcription tool

10. DRI resources
We have a huge number of resources on our website that could be useful
(all links found under ‘Resources’ in the main navigation at dri.ie):
- Training and Education (https://dri.ie/dri-training-and-education)
- Publications (including metadata standards)
(https://dri.ie/publications)
- Research Data Management (https://dri.ie/research-data-and-dri)
- DRI User Guides (https://guides.dri.ie)
- Digital Preservation videos and training:
https://vimeo.com/digitalrepositoryireland

11. Making your research outputs sustainable
Treat your Data Management Plan as a living document
and review it regularly.
- Does it reflect the current project?
- Have you found the right home for your data?
- Is it the long-term home?
- Have you assessed what will be preserved and what
will not be preserved?
- Have you built in the processes you need to preserve
your data? (e.g. Metadata)
- Have you built it into the project timeline?

13. Why deposit your data with DRI?
● We embed FAIR practices in everything we do
● Your data will be discoverable with thematically and location-specific collections
from over 50 island-wide organisations
● We are actively engaged with European and Global data organisations and projects-
DRI is the Irish node for Research Data Alliance, works with Europeana and is part
of the ‘WorldFAIR: Global Cooperation on FAIR Data Policy and Practice’ project
● We work closely with Researchers- we are working with research projects like
OS200, Feminist Art Making Histories and Full Stack Feminism
● We are researchers too- DRI undertakes research projects - Our Archiving
Reproductive Health project won the 2022 Digital Preservation Award for
Safeguarding the Digital Legacy

14. Come talk to us-
Dr Lisa Griffith- Interim Director
l.griffith@ria.ie
Kevin Long- Digital Archivist
k.long@ria.ie
Lorraine Marrey- Training and
Engagement Manager
l.marrey@ria.ie