Preservation watch: what to monitor and how

For successful preservation operations, a preservation system needs to be capable of monitoring compliance of preservation operations to specifications, alignment of these operations with the organisation’s preservation objectives, and associ- ated risks and opportunities. This requires linking a number of diverse information sources and specifying complex con- ditions. For example, the content to be preserved needs to be related to specifications of significant properties, to the file formats used to represent that content, to the software environments available to analyse, render and convert it and the technical environments available to the designated user communities that will consume this content. This article analyses aspects of interest in a preservation context that call for automated monitoring and investigates the feasibility of drawing sufficient information from diverse sources together and linking it in a meaningful way. We define a number of preservation triggers that lead to preservation planning activities and present the requirements and a high-level design of a preservation watch system that is currently being developed. We demonstrate the value of such a monitoring approach on a number of scenarios and cases

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Preservation process modelling (including a review of semantic process modelling and workflow languages)

This report describes in a formalised way a comprehensive set of processes for digital preservation. These processes are drawn from a series of relevant projects and standards from the preservation community, including OAIS, TRAC, PLANETS and others. The result is intended to be used as a generic baseline that those interested in audiovisual preservation can refer to, extract and customise processes in order to fit with their specific AV preservation needs

Documentation, Common Information and Short Overview of the E-ARK pilots

This report contains the common information and short overview of the pilots, along with references to the final version of the Pilot Definition Excel files and Pilot Documentation Packages

Information Technology and the Evolution of the Library

The purpose of this research is to examine the current state of the practice of information technology use among academic and research libraries in order to gain insight into the level of maturity of various emerging technologies such as the Institutional Repository (IR) to be used to provide descriptive guidance and context to other institutions considering them for application. This research uses a case study methodology involving a single case design with multiple units of analysis, and draws evidence from individual interviews of research and education libraries chosen from a range of sizes, foci, and jurisdictions. This evidence is coupled with review of those institutions’ public documentation and that of their partners to assess what academic libraries are doing today to meet the needs of the institutions they serve, what they have planned to provide these services, and what unplanned activities they feel are important to continue to make the information they steward available. Respondents cited several key information technology applications including institutional repositories, federated searching, and other integrated library services as tools being migrated towards to help them fulfill their missions. Interview and archival search results demonstrate a marked drive toward increased collaboration among institutions and regional repositories, a desire to provide rich content and seamless interfaces to library customers, and a trend towards hybrid systems to meet institutional archive and faculty communication needs

Detailed Pilots Specification

The Electronic Archiving Service consists of a series of activities covered by software tools and manual workflow steps. These tools are currently partly in existence, some are being developed by E-ARK project, many more are to be added by developments of the digital preservation community in the future. The role of this report is to identify the most relevant scenarios for the E-ARK Service, define which scenario which level of activity is needed in order to bridge the gap of the currently existing solutions (e.g. integration, software development, interface definition

Building information modeling – A game changer for interoperability and a chance for digital preservation of architectural data?

Digital data associated with the architectural design-andconstruction process is an essential resource alongside -and even past- the lifecycle of the construction object it describes. Despite this, digital architectural data remains to be largely neglected in digital preservation research – and vice versa, digital preservation is so far neglected in the design-and-construction process. In the last 5 years, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has seen a growing adoption in the architecture and construction domains, marking a large step towards much needed interoperability. The open standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) is one way in which data is exchanged in BIM processes. This paper presents a first digital preservation based look at BIM processes, highlighting the history and adoption of the methods as well as the open file format standard IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) as one way to store and preserve BIM data

Audiovisual preservation strategies, data models and value-chains

This is a report on preservation strategies, models and value-chains for digital file-based audiovisual content. The report includes: (a)current and emerging value-chains and business-models for audiovisual preservation;(b) a comparison of preservation strategies for audiovisual content including their strengths and weaknesses, and(c) a review of current preservation metadata models, and requirements for extension to support audiovisual files