Project Aims

CLIF: a collaboration between the University of Hull and King’s College London

At the heart of meeting institutional needs for managing digital content is the need to understand the different activities that the content goes through, from planning and creation through to disposal or preservation.  Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools.  Once created the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point.  A number of different systems can be involved at different points: one of these may be a repository.  To embed repositories in the content lifecycle, and prevent them becoming yet another content silo within the institution, they thus need to be integrated with other systems that support other parts of this lifecycle.  In this way the content can be moved between systems as required, minimising the constraints of any one of them.

The Content Lifecycle Integration Framework (CLIF) project will examine the management of the lifecycle of digital content from creation through to disposal or preservation across system boundaries. It will carry out this examination through the integration of the Fedora digital repository system with two other systems used within the HE sector in the UK and abroad, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) and Sakai, to enable the movement of content between them at specific points in its lifecycle, in accordance with identified use case requirements: a preliminary investigation of integration between MOSS and Sakai will also be undertaken. All three systems are used to manage digital content, and each addresses different overlapping parts of the content lifecycle. Integration will use a loosely coupled, open standards-based approach to maximise re-use outside the project.

CLIF will include a research strand, investigating the content lifecycle and how systems can best support this, and a technical development strand to carry out the integration work informed by the research.