Business Process Risk Management and Simulation Modelling for Digital Audio-Visual Media Preservation.

Digitised and born-digital Audio-Visual (AV) content presents new challenges for preservation and Quality Assurance (QA) to ensure that cultural heritage is accessible for the long term. Digital archives have developed strategies for avoiding, mitigating and recovering from digital AV loss using IT-based systems, involving QA tools before ingesting files into the archive and utilising file-based replication to repair files that may be damaged while in the archive. However, while existing strategies are effective for addressing issues related to media degradation, issues such as format obsolescence and failures in processes and people pose significant risk to the long-term value of digital AV content. We present a Business Process Risk management framework (BPRisk) designed to support preservation experts in managing risks to long-term digital media preservation. This framework combines workflow and risk specification within a single risk management process designed to support continual improvement of workflows. A semantic model has been developed that allows the framework to incorporate expert knowledge from both preservation and security experts in order to intelligently aid workflow designers in creating and optimising workflows. The framework also provides workflow simulation functionality, allowing users to a) understand the key vulnerabilities in the workflows, b) target investments to address those vulnerabilities, and c) minimise the economic consequences of risks. The application of the BPRisk framework is demonstrated on a use case with the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), discussing simulation results and an evaluation against the outcomes of executing the planned workflow

BlogForever D5.2: Implementation of Case Studies

This document presents the internal and external testing results for the BlogForever case studies. The evaluation of the BlogForever implementation process is tabulated under the most relevant themes and aspects obtained within the testing processes. The case studies provide relevant feedback for the sustainability of the platform in terms of potential users’ needs and relevant information on the possible long term impact

Fedora Commons 3.0 Versus DSpace 1.5 : Selecting an Enterprise-Grade Repository System for FAO of the United Nations

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersAn extensive evaluation of the Fedora Commons 3.0 and DSpace 1.5 digital document repository systems has been conducted. The evaluation aimed at selecting an open source software package that best satisfies the FAO Open Archive and FAO organizational requirements and the requirements for the storage, dissemination and preservation of documents and bibliographic metadata. Both repository systems were evaluated against thirty-two criteria chosen from nine core categories of requirements: community, security, functionality, integration, modularity, metadata, statistics and reports, preservation, and outputs. These criteria were selected with the merger of the FAODOC and FAO Corporate Document Repository (CDR) into the FAO Open Archive in mind.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation

Archiving Archaeological Research Data - On Requirements, Objectives and First Experiences from a German Respectively Saxon Point of View

Preserving digital data over long times is an ambitious task. While most analogue documents are best stored without touching them, digital data need permanent care and curation. Regarding some differences between analogue and digital data - lifecycle, complexity, functionality and so on - it can be realized, that digital archiving is a new challenge. This paper will deal with requirements and objectives on archiving archaeological research data, as discussed in a working group of the Association of State Archaeologists in Germany (Verband der Landesarchäologen in Deutschland – VLA). Interesting themes of that discussions were “Archive Objectives”, “Worthiness of Archiving”, “Suitability of Archiving” and “Future Use Scenarios”. This paper will also deal with first experiences in building up a digital archive for archaeological research data in Saxony. This archive follows principles of “Open Archival Information System” (OAIS). It is based on professional software that has to be adapted to the special requirements of archaeological data like e.g. excavation documentation. OAIS defines six complex functions to be performed, e.g. data management and preservation planning.  Preservation strategies are presented to give an idea on how to preserve content and function of archive material while systems are changing over time. This is an alternative to the idea, knowing file formats will solve all preservation problems. Archiving is the most intensive and most expensive way to store data. But aren’t there any alternatives? This paper will address some small steps leading towards a proper archiving without using large budgets. Going such steps will help to reduce the risk of losing important digital information. Going these steps will also bridge the gap until proper preservation tools will be available at a reasonable price. This article may be helpful for archaeologists that are about to build up an archive to preserve digital data for long terms. The presented concept of preservation strategies may be of interest for specialists on digital archiving

ArchivePress: A Really Simple Solution to Archiving Blog Content

ArchivePress is a new technical solution for collecting and archiving content from blogs. Current solutions are commonly based on typical web archiving activities, whereby a crawler is configured to harvest a copy of the blog and return the copy to a web archive. This approach is perfectly acceptable if the requirement is that the site is presented as an integral whole. However, ArchivePress is based upon the premise that blogs are a distinct class of web-based resource, in which the post, not the page, is atomic, and certain properties, such as layouts and colours, are demonstrably superfluous for many (if not most) users. As a result, an approach that builds on the functionality provided by web feeds to capture only selected aspects of the blog offers more potential. This is particularly the case when institutions wish to develop collections of aggregated blog content from a range of different sources. The presentation will describe our research to develop such an approach, including work to define the significant properties of blogs, details of the technical development, and pilot collections against which the tool has been tested

Invest to Save: Report and Recommendations of the NSF-DELOS Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation

Digital archiving and preservation are important areas for research and development, but there is no agreed upon set of priorities or coherent plan for research in this area. Research projects in this area tend to be small and driven by particular institutional problems or concerns. As a consequence, proposed solutions from experimental projects and prototypes tend not to scale to millions of digital objects, nor do the results from disparate projects readily build on each other. It is also unclear whether it is worthwhile to seek general solutions or whether different strategies are needed for different types of digital objects and collections. The lack of coordination in both research and development means that there are some areas where researchers are reinventing the wheel while other areas are neglected. Digital archiving and preservation is an area that will benefit from an exercise in analysis, priority setting, and planning for future research. The WG aims to survey current research activities, identify gaps, and develop a white paper proposing future research directions in the area of digital preservation. Some of the potential areas for research include repository architectures and inter-operability among digital archives; automated tools for capture, ingest, and normalization of digital objects; and harmonization of preservation formats and metadata. There can also be opportunities for development of commercial products in the areas of mass storage systems, repositories and repository management systems, and data management software and tools.

Planets: Integrated Services for Digital Preservation

The Planets Project is developing services and technology to address core challenges in digital preservation. This article introduces the motivation for this work, describes the extensible technical architecture and places the Planets approach into the context of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. It also provides a scenario demonstrating Planets’ usefulness in solving real-life digital preservation problems and an overview of the project’s progress to date