The Preserv project is investigating preservation services for institutional repositories. Service providers can provide preservation expertise, determined by best-practice, enabling repository administrators to focus on supporting and capturing content. By building services that address specific preservation needs, repository software such as EPrints can, apart from some offering some elementary preservation support, focus on the primary tasks of user interaction, authorisation, storage, and access.

The choice and provision of preservation services will be informed by repository policies, including policy on preservation. A key step in developing a preservation policy is to identify the types of material contained in a repository in terms of technical structure, or file formats (e.g. PDF, HTML). The National Archives curates a database of file formats, PRONOM, and this can help to identify repository content by using TNA's Digital Record Object Identification (DROID) open source software, which can be downloaded and applied by any repository.

Format identification is only a first step towards preservation, however. The question is what you do with this information. Format IDs need to be verified, and file formats may need to be migrated to other formats in the event of obsolescence. This is where preservation services can help.