The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded Chronicles in Preservation project (http://metaarchive.org/neh/) completed this Comparative Analysis of three Distributed Digital Preservation systems to analyze their underlying technologies and methodologies: -Chronopolis using iRODS (http://chronopolis.sdsc.edu/). -University of North Texas using Coda (http://www.library.unt.edu/). -MetaArchive Cooperative using LOCKSS (http://metaarchive.org/). This Comparative Analysis is not intended to designate any of the Distributed Digital Preservation (DDP) systems as superior or inferior to one another in any of the areas disclosed. On the contrary, digital preservation is often best served by maintaining a variety of solutions, and each of the three DDP systems have partnered actively with one another on several digital preservation initiatives and are learning constantly from one another’s approaches. The Chronicles in Preservation project, and more specifically, this Comparative Analysis, has been undertaken by these three systems in order to test, document, and refine their processes, not in isolation, but as a collaborative effort.

The IMLS-funded Lifecycle Management of ETDs project has researched, developed, and/or documented a suite of modular Lifecycle Management Tools for curating electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The project targeted the following curation activities: Virus Checking, Format Recognition, Preservation Event Record-Keeping, and Simple ETD & Metadata Submission. This manual describes how to implement Lifecycle Management Tools for those activities. The manual is written for ETD Program Managers. It describes a general rationale and use case for each curation activity mentioned above in the context of an ETD program. While the technical and administrative implementations of ETD programs are diverse, this manual includes generalized recommendations for where and when to deploy the tools in an ETD submission workflow. ETD Program Managers are encouraged to coordinate with the full range of stakeholders (including the graduate schools, libraries, campus IT, and vendors) to adapt tools to their implementation.