RODA - A Service-Oriented Repository to Preserve Authentic Digital Objects

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Fedora User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-20 03:30 PM – 05:00 PMIn mid 2006, the Portuguese National Archives (Directorate-General of the Portuguese Archives) launched a project called RODA (Repository of Authentic Digital Objects) aiming at identifying and bringing together all the necessary technology, human resources and political support to carry out long-term preservation of digital materials being produced by the Portuguese public administration. As part of the original goals of RODA was the development of a digital repository capable of ingesting, managing and providing access to the various types of digital objects produced by national public institutions. The development of such repository should be supported by open-source technologies and, as much as possible, be based on existing standards. Since RODA is nearly finished, this communication aims at describing its main results.European Union; POAP; Ministry of Culture; Portuguese Republi

Critique of Architectures for Long-Term Digital Preservation

Evolving technology and fading human memory threaten the long-term intelligibility of many kinds of documents. Furthermore, some records are susceptible to improper alterations that make them untrustworthy. Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs) and Trustworthy Digital Objects (TDOs) seem to be the only broadly applicable digital preservation methodologies proposed. We argue that the TDR approach has shortfalls as a method for long-term digital preservation of sensitive information. Comparison of TDR and TDO methodologies suggests differentiating near-term preservation measures from what is needed for the long term. TDO methodology addresses these needs, providing for making digital documents durably intelligible. It uses EDP standards for a few file formats and XML structures for text documents. For other information formats, intelligibility is assured by using a virtual computer. To protect sensitive information—content whose inappropriate alteration might mislead its readers, the integrity and authenticity of each TDO is made testable by embedded public-key cryptographic message digests and signatures. Key authenticity is protected recursively in a social hierarchy. The proper focus for long-term preservation technology is signed packages that each combine a record collection with its metadata and that also bind context—Trustworthy Digital Objects.

Relational database preservation through XML modelling

Digital Archives are complex structures composed of human resources, state of the art technologies, policies and data. Due to the heritage keeping role that archives assume in our society, it is important to make sure that, the data that is produced by our organizations is preserved accordingly in order do document is activity and provide evidence of their activities. Information stored in an archive must be treated differently than other types of information because it is kept with the purpose of providing evidence of some organizations activity. Due to this fact some properties should be preserved for long periods of time: integrity, liability and authenticity. The preservation of this information extremely complex as digital objects are far from being stable. They are software and hardware dependent. Normally, their auto-preservation period is about 5 years. In this context digital preservation practices become very important and should be part of the institution's planning. The problem is how to keep digital objects in such a way that their information is accessible long past their auto-preservation period. RODA (Repository of Authentic Digital Objects) is a joint venture between public administration and academic researchers that aims to become the public administration repository. A repository where users can rely on digital objects authenticity and where digital objects are expected to endure long beyond the 5 years expectation. For the first prototype three kinds of digital objects were considered: text documents, still images and relational databases. We will focus this paper on the relational databases component. Relational databases ingestion is accomplished by migrating the original database to an XML representation. This representation (DBML - database markup language) was defined according to a series of requisites, trying to preserve database content, database structure and database attributes. Throughout the paper we will discuss the creation of DBML and report its application to some real case studies.(undefined

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

General pilot model and use case definition

This report describes the concepts and elements of the General Model of E-ARK pilot site activities

Database Preservation Toolkit: a flexible tool to normalize and give access to databases

Digital preservation is emerging as an area of work and research that tries to provide answers that will ensure a continued and long-term access to information stored digitally. IT Platforms are constantly changing and evolving and nothing can guarantee the continuity of access to digital artifacts in their absence. This paper focuses on a specic family of digital objects: Relational Databases; they are the most frequent type of databases used by organizations worldwide. Database Preservation Toolkit enables the preservation of relational databases holding the structure and content of the the database in a preservation format in order to provide access to the database information in a long term period. If in one hand there is a need to migrate databases to newer ones that appear with technological evolution, on the other hand there is also the need to preserve the information they hold for a long time period, due to legal duties but also due to archival issues. That being said, that information must be available no matter the database management system where the information came from. In this area, solutions are still scarce. Main products for relational database preservation include CHRONOS and SIARD. The rst one is, in most of the cases, unreachable due to the associated costs. The second one is not really a product but a preservation format. The main idea behind this work was to explore the main features and limitations of the existing products in order to improve 'db-preservation-toolkit' (http://keeps.github.io/ db-preservation-toolkit/), an extracted component from the RODA project (http://www.roda-community.org). Therefore, 'db-preservation-toolkit' was improved with respect to performance and also with new features addiction in order to support more database management systems, address some missing features of the other products, support of a new preservation format (SIARD) and provide an interface where it is possible to access and search the information of the archived databases.This work is supported by the European Commission under FP7 CIP PSP grant agreement number 620998 - E-ARK

The Preservation of Digital Objects in German Repositories: Die Archivierung digitaler Objekte in deutschenRepositorien: Drei Fallstudien: Three Case Studies

Taking its cue from the increasing amount of digital content deposited into institutional and subject repositories as well as the open question of repositories'' role in long-term preservation, this study presents case studies of three German institutional and subject repositories all of which are in a different stage of establishing a (cooperative) framework for the long-term preservation of their digital collections. Drawing on different sets of criteria for trustworthy repositories, it is investigated which strategies the selected repositories pursue to preserve the digital assets in their collections, and how these strategies are implemented with the help of both human repository staff and the repository software used. The following repositories are considered: pedocs (Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung), JUWEL (Forschungszentrum Jülich), and Qucosa (SLUB Dresden). In that the latter can be regarded as examples for common types of (German) repositories, the results of this study might on the one hand serve as a guideline for repositories that intend, similar to the ones described here, to explore questions of long-term preservation in the near future, or are even taking their first concrete steps in this field. On the other hand, it is hoped that this work can at least give some hints as to the stage and status of long-term preservation in the German repository landscape

Beyond relational databases: preserving the data

Relational databases are one of the main technologies supporting information assets in today’s organizations. They are designed to store, organize and retrieve digital information, and are such a fundamental part of information systems that most would not be able to function without them. Very often, the information contained in databases is irreplaceable or prohibitively expensive to reacquire; therefore, steps must be taken to ensure that the information within databases is preserved. This paper describes a methodology for long-term preservation of relational databases based on information extraction and format migration to a preservation format. It also presents a tool that was developed to support this methodology: Database Preservation Toolkit (DBPTK), as well as the processes and formats needed to preserve databases. The DBPTK connects to live relational databases and extracts information into formats more adequate for long-term preservation. Supported preservation formats include the SIARD 2, created by a cooperation between the Swiss Federal Archives and the E-ARK project that is becoming a standard in the area. DBPTK has a flexible plugin-based architecture enabling its use for other purposes like database upgrade and database migration between different systems. Presented real case scenarios demonstrate the usefulness, correctness and performance of the tool.The initial E-ARK project was in part supported by the European Commission within the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme 2007–2013, Grant Agreement no. 620998 under the Policy Support Programme