The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is delighted to share our Strategic Plan 2025–2029, which outlines our commitment to safeguarding Ireland’s digital legacy.
The Plan was launched on Thursday 7 November at the Royal Irish Academy, as part of World Digital Preservation Day, a global celebration of the digital preservation community’s efforts to secure our shared digital legacy.
DRI Chair John McDonough addresses the attendees at the launch of the DRI Strategic Plan at the Royal Irish Academy, World Digital Preservation Day, 7 Nov 2024
DRI provides a unique service as the only national infrastructure in Ireland with an exclusive digital preservation remit. Digital content is fragile and erasable, meaning that our shared digital cultural heritage is at risk of being lost without digital preservation, described as the ‘active management of digital content over time to ensure its ongoing access’ (Library of Congress). Our aim is to safeguard Ireland’s digital memory for future generations by providing stewardship of digitised and born-digital humanities and social sciences (HSS) research outputs and cultural heritage data in the DRI repository for long-term discovery and access.
The Strategy outlines our vision for the future, sets organisational goals, and has allowed us to plan strategically to ensure that we have the resources in place to meet the growing digital preservation needs of the Irish higher education and cultural heritage sectors that we serve.
The development of the Strategy was led by an external consultant in consultation with the DRI Organisational Strategy Task Force chaired by the DRI Director Lisa Griffith and consisting of DRI staff members Aileen O’Carroll; Áine Madden; Beth Knazook; Kathryn Cassidy; Kevin Long; and Stuart Kenny. It was further shaped following extensive consultation throughout 2024 with the wider DRI team and our stakeholders – DRI Members; Repository end-users, our Expert Advisory Group, the DRI Board, the DRI Management Team, and our funding bodies.
DRI staff members attending the launch of the DRI Strategic Plan at the Royal Irish Academy, World Digital Preservation Day, 7 Nov 2024
We see this new Strategy as a living document, one that reaffirms our commitments to the communities we service and outlines our priorities for future work, but also one that will be periodically reviewed and revised to adjust priorities and reevaluate goals, as the digital preservation landscape evolves and new opportunities emerge.
Commenting on the Strategy, Chair of the DRI Board John Mc Donough said:
‘The launch of this Strategy marks a new chapter in the development and growth of the Digital Repository of Ireland. It sets out the roadmap for the next five years and illustrates the expertise, enthusiasm, and ambition of the DRI team for the local and national communities they support.’
DRI Director Dr Lisa Griffith said:
‘We are delighted to share this vision for DRI and our work for the next five years. We will continue to see a strong demand for our services and this plan focuses on how we will build capacity to meet that demand. I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to the Strategic Plan.’
Our work for the next five years will focus on:
- Nurturing digital preservation at a national level, sharing our expertise (technical, professional, and curatorial) and supporting the cultural heritage, humanities and social sciences domains
- Undertaking the digital preservation of the collections deposited by our members, and research data entrusted to us by humanities and social science researchers and culture and heritage practitioners
- Developing policies and best practices through collaboration with the global digital preservation and research data communities, an international network of organisations and e-infrastructures in the fields of digital preservation, digital humanities, social sciences, and data management
This work will be carried out in DRI’s priority areas of Digital Preservation; Innovation and Infrastructure; Education and Engagement; Open Access and Research; and Membership and Community.
We anticipate that there will be significant growth in demand for digital preservation services in the next five years. We also recognise that our work – digital preservation, open research, and repositories – is constantly evolving. Standards for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data, for instance, are continually evolving to meet the needs of researchers and systems. We expect to see more collection and research data reuse and a greater need for researchers to think about preservation and access for a wider range of research outputs. As such, our strategy seeks to balance supporting our current community and infrastructure while building capacity to meet future needs and challenges.
You can access the DRI Strategy 2025–2029 in the Repository: https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.cr571w55h
As part of our ongoing commitment to improve the quality of our services in Irish in line with recommendations outlined in the Official Languages (Amendment) Act 2021, we have also published an Irish language version of the Strategy in the Repository: https://doi.org/10.7486/DRI.cv442s39c
