The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and Scholars Portal has announced that the first version of the Dataverse-Archivematica integration for long-term dataset preservation is now available for community testing and feedback. For the past several years the Scholars Portal team has been working with Artefactual Systems to create an integration between Dataverse and Archivematica. This integration enables users of Archivematica to select and copy datasets from Dataverse instances and process them for long-term access and digital preservation. The Archival Information Packages (AIPs) include metadata and all files stored by Dataverse, and are packaged for long-term storage and management using Archivematica’s standards-compliant workflow. Integration between Archivematica and Dataverse expands capacity to preserve research data, opening up new avenues for librarians and archivists to make valuable research outputs accessible into the future.

The integration was made available in the 1.8 release of Archivematica. A demo sandbox provided by Scholars Portal is now ready for testing and feedback by community members for a limited period. A more detailed white paper about the integration will be released after the testing period is completed.

Artefactual is delighted to be part of ongoing efforts to improve research data preservation, which is a pressing need for many academic research libraries and other organizations involved in creating or acquiring research datasets.