OBF Archiving and Preservation: End of Year 1 Reflections

End of Year 1 Re ections 2At the close of Year 1 of the Open Book Futures Project, we reflect on the progress made and looking to the future for Year 2. Detailed below is the progress made in further developing the Thoth Archiving Network, a slight rebrand, institutional and generalist repositories on board so far, and the challenges, lessons learned, and future direction of the Network.We also talk about the first year of our National Libraries Network, with a brief summary of what we've learned so far. The Thoth Archiving NetworkBeginning with the COPIM project (2019 -2023) and progressing into the Open Book Futures project (2023 -2026), the Thoth Archiving Network has been created to support the archiving of open access monographs in order to ensure future access to important, but at-risk, scholarly material.Our initial vision was to create a pushbutton deposit tool for the small and scholar-led presses who might otherwise be excluded from existing archiving solutions due to various resource deficits.Participating institutional repositories would provide archiving locations for these publishers, who, as we found, often did not have any archiving or preservation solution in place at all.The fledgling network is up and running with some new approaches, e.g. the use of generalist repositories, but with the same ambition to help small and scholar-led OA monograph presses secure their work for the future.As we will detail, our approaches have necessarily had to change somewhat due to the realities these challenges have presented.However, as Thoth and the archiving network progress and mature, we will keep the needs and requirements of the small and scholar-led press at the heart of what we do. Now open: the Thoth Open Archiving NetworkPreviously TAN, or the Thoth Archiving Network, we have recently reappraised our name and aims for the network and have decided to do a slight rebrand!While the archiving network always focused on open access monographs, so in that respect was always 'open', one realization we came to at the end of Year 1 of Open Book Futures was that we wanted openness to not only apply to the books we were archiving.While the concept is currently in its nascency, our ambition is to more fully develop our archiving network as completely open in its practices, one that could even be audited from the outside to assure the works we deposit in our participating repositories are safe, uncorrupted, and in the locations we promised.We are working with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) around how we might implement creation and management of checksums, store these within Thoth, and thus allow for our entire process to become auditable in a transparent and dependable way.There will still be some testing to do in the future once checksums are implemented on the various repository platforms we'll be using, but more than just in service of open access monographs, we are hoping to also perform as fully open infrastructure, too.This new branding has yet to be implemented across all participating platforms but will be rolled out in due course over the coming months.