California Digital Library

In order better to meet the needs of its diverse University of California constituencies, the California Digital Library UC Curation Center is re-envisioning its approach to digital curation infrastructure by devolving function into a set of granular, independent, but interoperable micro-services. Since each of these services is small and self-contained, they are more easily developed, deployed, maintained, and enhanced; at the same time, complex curation function can emerge from the strategic combination of atomistic services. The emergent approach emphasizes the persistence of content rather than the systems in which that management occurs, thus the paradigmatic archival culture is not unduly coupled to any particular technological context. This results in a curation environment that is comprehensive in scope, yet flexible with regard to local policies and practices and sustainable despite the inevitability of disruptive change in technology and user expectation.

Only a small part of the research which has been carried out to date on the preservation of digital objects has looked specifically at the preservation of software. This is because the preservation of software has been seen as a less urgent problem than the preservation of other digital objects, and also the complexity of software artifacts makes the problem of preserving them a daunting one. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to want to preserve software. In this paper we consider some of the motivations behind software preservation, based on an analysis of software preservation practice. We then go on to consider what it means to preserve software, discussing preservation approaches, and developing a performance model which determines how the adequacy of the a software preservation method. Finally we discuss some implications for preservation analysis for the case of software artifacts.

A digital repository can be seen as a combination of services, resources, and policies. One of the fundamental design questions for digital repositories is how to break down the services and resources: who will have responsibility, where they will reside, and how they will interact. There is no single, optimal answer to this question. The most appropriate arrangement depends on many factors that vary across repository contexts and are very likely to change over time. This paper reports on our investigation and testing of various repository "slicing and dicing" scenarios, their potential benefits, and implications for implementation, administration, and service offerings. Vital considerations for each option (1) efficiencies of resource use, (2) management of dependencies across entities, and (3) the repository business model most appropriate to the participating organizations.

Important legal and economic motivations exist for the design and engineering industry to address and integrate digital long-term preservation into product life cycle management (PLM). Investigations revealed that it is not sufficient to archive only the product design data which is created in early PLM phases, but preservation is needed for data that is produced during the entire product lifecycle including early and late phases. Data that is relevant for preservation consists of requirements analysis documents, design rationale, data that reflects experiences during product operation and also metadata like social collaboration context. In addition, also the engineering environment itself that contains specific versions of all tools and services is a candidate for preservation. This paper takes a closer look at engineering preservation use case scenarios as well as PLM characteristics and workflows that are relevant for long-term preservation. Resulting requirements for a long-term preservation system lead to an OAIS (Open Archival Information System) based system architecture and a proposed preservation service interface that respects the needs of the engineering industry.

The Chronopolis Digital Preservation Initiative, one of the Library of Congress' latest efforts to collect and preserve atrisk digital information, has completed its first year of service as a multi-member partnership to meet the archival needs of a wide range of cultural and social domains. In this paper we will explore the major themes within Chronopolis.

This paper will provide an overview of developments from the two phases of the LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) project, LIFE1 and LIFE2, before describing the aims and latest progress from the third phase. Emphasis will be placed on the various approaches to estimate preservation costs including the use of templates to facilitate user interaction with the costing tool. The paper will also explore how the results of the Project will help to inform preservation planning and collection management decisions with a discussion of scenarios in which the LIFE costing tool could be applied. This will be supported by a description of how adopting institutions are already utilising LIFE tools and techniques to analyse and refine their existing preservation activity as well as to enhance their collection management decision making.

The challenge of digital preservation of scientific data lies in the need to preserve not only the dataset itself but also the ability it has to deliver knowledge to a future user community. A true scientific research asset allows future users to reanalyze the data within new contexts. Thus, in order to carry out meaningful preservation we need to ensure that future users are equipped with the necessary information to re-use the data. This paper presents an overview of a preservation analysis methodology which was developed in response to that need on the CASPAR and Digital Curation Centre SCARP projects. We intend to place it in relation to other digital preservation practices discussing how they can interact to provide archives caring for scientific data sets with the full arsenal of tools and techniques necessary to rise to this challenge.

The Planets project is developing a service-oriented environment for the definition and evaluation of preservation strategies for human-centric data. It focuses on the question of logically preserving digital materials, as opposed to the physical preservation of content bit-streams. This includes the development of preservation tools for the automated characterization, migration, and comparison of different types of digital objects as well as the emulation of their original runtime environment in order to ensure longtime access and interpretability. The Planets integrated environment provides a number of end-user applications that allow data curators to execute and scientifically evaluate preservation experiments based on composable preservation services. In this paper, we focus on the middleware and programming model and show how it can be utilized in order to create complex preservation workflows.

Representatives from a variety of distributed digital preservation initiatives will serve as panel members and discuss the technical adaptability, economics, and functionally compelling benefits of using cooperative distributed digital preservation networks to preserve the vast array of at-risk digital content produced by our societies and their institutions.

The process of setting up a digital preservation repository in compliancy with the OAIS model is not only a technical challenge: libraries also need to develop and maintain appropriate skills and organizations. Digital activities, including digital preservation, are nowadays moving into the mainstream activity of the Library and are integrated in its workflows. The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has been working on the definition of digital preservation activities since 2003. This paper aims at presenting the organizational and human resources challenges that have been faced by the library in this context, and those that are still awaiting us. The library has been facing these challenges through a variety of actions at different levels: organizational changes, training sessions, dedicated working group and task forces, analysis of skills and processes, etc. The results of these actions provide insights on how a national library is going digital, and what is needed to reach this longstanding goal.