The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was established to help solve the extensive challenges of digital preservation and digital curation and to lead research, development, advice, and support services for higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.Throughout its history the DCC has been an active organisation in the realm of digital preservation. In partnership with other institutions, the DCC has created and developed tools for tackling issues in digital preservation and curation. Such tools include a lifecycle model for data curation, a risk assessment for digital repositories, and an interview protocol to assist institutions in understanding their research data collections.
This article seeks to determine the extent to which the principle of persistence is observed by repositories and the organizations that operate them. We also evaluate the impact that negative repository persistence levels may be having on the scholarly record. We do this by interrogating and combining data about European repositories from several repository registries and web scraped sources, including the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, thereby creating a unique dataset of historic repository locations and their OAI-PMH endpoints. We then use this data as the basis for text mining CORE, a vast corpus of scholarly outputs, to determine the extent to which impersistent European repository content has permeated the scholarly literature. Our findings indicate over a fifth of European repositories (> 20
