Overview
Medusa provides a web-accessible management interface to preservation microservices built upon an enduring storage and management environment for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library’s digital collections. Written in Ruby on Rails, Medusa has been in production since 2014. From 2014-2015 Medusa storage was hosted primarily on-site. In 2019, Medusa’s web application and storage were shifted fully into cloud services.
Access
Access to the collection registry is restricted to digital content producers at the University of Illinois Library. Medusa only displays information about collections to authenticated, approved users.
Medusa production site
Medusa test site (accessible to library staff)
Contact
To submit a general question, request training, or report a system outage, contact: medusa-admin@lists.illinois.edu
Documentation
Please see Managing Digital Collections: A Guide to Local Practice.
Updated and improved documentation coming soon.
Policies
Coming soon.
Publications and Presentations
Rimkus, Kyle R., Bethany Anderson, Karl E. Germeck, Cameron C. Nielsen, Christopher J. Prom, and Tracy Popp. “Preservation and Access for Born-Digital Electronic Records: The Case for an Institutional Digital Content Format Registry.” The American Archivist 83, no. 2 (March 8, 2021): 397–428. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-83.2.397.
Rimkus, Kyle R., and Scott D. Witmer. “Identifying Barriers to File Rendering in Bit-Level Preservation Repositories: A Preliminary Approach,” October 3, 2016. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/91660.
Rimkus, Kyle R., and Scott D. Witmer. “File Format Endangerment Data,” April 21, 2016. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/89994.
Rimkus, Kyle R., and Scott Witmer. “Advancing File Format Policymaking for Digital Preservation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,” 2015. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/88770.
Rimkus, Kyle R., Thomas Padilla, Tracy M. Popp, and Greer Martin. “‘Data from “‘Digital Preservation File Format Policies of ARL Member Libraries: An Analysis’”’ | IDEALS.” Dataset / spreadsheet, March 2014. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/47421.
Rimkus, Kyle R., Thomas Padilla, Tracy M. Popp, and Greer Martin. “Digital Preservation File Format Policies of ARL Member Libraries: An Analysis,” 2013. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/46427.
Rimkus, Kyle R., and Thomas G. Habing. “Medusa at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: A Digital Preservation Service Based on PREMIS.” Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, July 23, 2013. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/45232. [NOTE: This paper is outdated, as it represents abandoned plans to build Medusa using Fedora repository technologies).
Source code
Source code for the Medusa Digital Preservation Repository is available in the Medusa Collection Registry repository on Github, along with related components available from the broader Medusa Project. The project maintains an ongoing Change Log.