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The SPRUCE Project ended in November 2013. This page documents the most useful and reusable outputs from the project. It replaces the Old SPRUCE homepage. SPRUCE was a partnership between the University of Leeds, the British Library, the Digital Preservation Coalition, the London School of Economics, and the Open Planets Foundation. It was co-funded by Jisc.

SPRUCE aimed to support digital preservation in UK higher education and beyond with a community oriented approach. A draft final report can be viewed here.

All project outputs are available under open terms (proposed CC-BY-SA and Apache 2.0 respectively). Please attribute as: "The Jisc funded SPRUCE Project" and include an appropriate URL to the source.

These pages are updated by the community. For more information contact Bo Middleton (former SPRUCE Project Director) m dot m dot middleton at leeds dot ac dot uk, or Paul Wheatley (former SPRUCE Project Manager).

Digital Preservation Requirements and Solutions

A living archive of digital preservation practice that captures the preservation challenges faced by over a 100 practitioners from Libraries, Archives, Museums, Galleries and other organisations.

Use this to understand the kinds of preservation challenges that may be present in your data and find solutions to specific digital preservation challenges that you have encountered.

Digital Preservation Business Case Toolkit

A comprehensive toolkit to help practitioners and middle managers build business cases to fund digital preservation activities.

Use this to guide you through the process of building a business case that will secure funding for your digital preservation work.

The Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR)

COPTR describes tools useful for preserving digital information for the long term. COPTR is also an initiative to collate the knowledge of the digital preservation community on preservation tools in one place. Instead of organisations competing against each other with their own registries, COPTR is bringing them together. In doing so it's objective is to provide the best resource for practitioners on digital preservation tools.

Use this to find preservation tools to solve your preservation challenges.

FITS and C3PO preservation tool enhancements

SPRUCE identified a key practitioner need for better characterisation tools and then targeted small development projects at enhancing the FITS and C3PO tools and developing the processes and infrastructure to make these useful but outdated tools more easily maintainable by the community. In partnership with Harvard University and the OPF, we are establishing a Steering Group and development roadmap to ensure proper governance for this important toolset.

Use these tools to assess and understand the characteristics of your digital assets.

SPRUCE Award Projects

The SPRUCE Project made 12 awards of up to £5k available for further development of the practical digital preservation outcomes and digital preservation business cases, that were begun in SPRUCE events.

Use this to discover developments, trials and implementations of SPRUCE supported work.

How to run your own digital preservation mashup

A SPRUCE style mashup is a 3 day workshop for around 30 practitioners and developers that provides a way of sharing digital preservation expertise, identifying and understanding preservation challenges and developing preservation solution to those challenges. We've documented our experiences of running these events so that you can run your own mashups with the benefit of what we learned along the way. SPRUCE ran 3 mashups, 1 hackathon and various other events. Also see the The SPRUCE Mashup Manifesto.

Use this to learn about the SPRUCE mashup event format, and run your own mashups.

Getting Started With Hands on Digital Preservation

Taking your first steps in preserving your digital assets can be challenging. What should I tackle first? Which tools should I use? How do they work? This new guide provides step by step instructions to five practical preservation activities:

• Audit your digital collections
• Assess your organisation for digital preservation risks
• Stabilise a digital collection from handheld media
• Secure your bits
• Assess and understand the characteristics of your digital assets

Use this to guide you through the most common first steps in digital preservation.

Collaborative resources for supporting the digital preservation community

Ways that you can contribute to the digital preservation community and get even more back.

Use this to discover resources created by the community that you can make better.

SPRUCE Publications

Formal SPRUCE publications that were presented at conferences.

Use this to see and reference write ups of the approaches that SPRUCE pursued.