Archivematica As a Service: COPPUL’s Shared Digital Preservation Platform

The Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) is piloting a cloud-based preservation service using the Archivematica digital preservation system. The service is offered to COPPUL member institutions that wish to preserve digital holdings but prefer a hosted service to installing and managing local Archivematica instances. This service is a joint effort of COPPUL, Artefactual Systems (Archivematica lead developers), and University of British Columbia (UBC) Library (the cloud storage provider). COPPUL is responsible for promoting the service, signing up new institutions and seeding the one-time set- up costs. Artefactual Systems provides account administration, installation, server administration, and user technical support. UBC Library provides fee-based server hosting and digital object storage service. This article discusses COPPUL’s Archivematica-as-a-service model generally and covers certain aspects of implementation in greater detail, concluding with a discussion of future directions.