ABSTRACT
The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is an interactive national Trusted Digital Repository for contemporary and historical, social and cultural data held by Irish institutions, providing a central internet access point and interactive multimedia tools, for use by the public, students and scholars. This chapter highlights that key challenges for those providing user tools are associated with issues of preservation and sustainability of digital tools, and argues that for cultural heritage organizations the provision of digital tools is as important as providing access to digital content. DRI's stakeholder interviews served two purposes: requirements elicitation and policy development. Long-term digital preservation, concerned with providing sustained access to digital objects, is an activity that is rarely finished. The chapter describes that cultural heritage organizations must not only provide access to the digital cultural heritage content, which is stored, harvested and aggregated, but must also engage users with digital tools that enhance the user's experience and engagement with that content.
