Assessing digital preservation frameworks: the approach of the SHAMAN project

How can we deliver infrastructure capable of supporting the preservation of digital objects, as well as the services that can be applied to those digital objects, in ways that future unknown systems will understand? A critical problem in developing systems is the process of validating whether the delivered solution effectively reflects the validated requirements. This is a challenge also for the EU-funded SHAMAN project, which aims to develop an integrated preservation framework using grid-technologies for distributed networks of digital preservation systems, for managing the storage, access, presentation, and manipulation of digital objects over time. Recognising this, the project team ensured that alongside the user requirements an assessment framework was developed. This paper presents the assessment of the SHAMAN demonstrators for the memory institution, industrial design and engineering and eScience domains, from the point of view of user’s needs and fitness for purpose. An innovative synergistic use of TRAC criteria, DRAMBORA risk registry and mitigation strategies, iRODS rules and information system models requirements has been designed, with the underlying goal to define associated policies, rules and state information, and make them wherever possible machine-encodable and enforceable. The described assessment framework can be valuable not only for the implementers of this project preservation framework, but for the wider digital preservation community, because it provides a holistic approach to assessing and validating the preservation of digital libraries, digital repositories and data centres

Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe

Introduction : user studies for digital library development

Introductory chapter to the edited collection on user studies in digital library development. Contains a general introduction to the topic and biographical sketches of the contributors.peer-reviewe

Placing the Horse before the Cart: Conceptual and Technical Dimensions of Digital Curation

»Spannt das Pferd vor den Wagen! Konzeptuelle und technische Dimensionen Digitaler Bestandspflege«. Digital curation has to come from a conceptual starting point, like any other research or educational program. The balance between the practical and the theoretical components can be discussed: As Digital Humanities – and Digital Curation as part of it – stand at a nexus between traditional Humanities and Social Sciences, this balance may be less obvious, a position at that nexus is particularly rewarding however. The need for developments within Computer Science has to be determined by the joined conceptual mandate, however. To provide for an understanding of this conceptual mandate, we describe the development of digital curation. As a term it can be traced back to the early nineties, as a extremely vivid research agenda, with many international links, it has created a plethora of projects, conferences and publications since the early years of this century

Placing the horse before the cart: conceptual and technical dimensions of digital curation

"Digital curation has to come from a conceptual starting point, like any other research or educational program. The balance between the practical and the theoretical components can be discussed: As Digital Humanities - and Digital Curation as part of it - stand at a nexus between traditional Humanities and Social Sciences, this balance may be less obvious, a position at that nexus is particularly rewarding however. The need for developments within Computer Science has to be determined by the joined conceptual mandate, however. To provide for an understanding of this conceptual mandate, we describe the development of digital curation. As a term it can be traced back to the early nineties, as an extremely vivid research agenda, with many international links, it has created a plethora of projects, conferences and publications since the early years of this century." (author's abstract

Long-tem digital preservation in e-Science domains

The complexity of digital preservation increases with the fact that each type of digital object has its own particularities and special requirements. The collaborative environment of the scientific community, and associated services and infrastructures, usually known as e-Science (or enhanced Science), involves the requirement of interoperability and the respective data sharing. In a broad sense, e-Science concerns the set of techniques, services, personnel and organizations involved in collaborative and networked science. It includes technology but also human social structures and new large scale processes of making science. It also means, on the same time, a need and an opportunity for a better integration between science and engineering processes. Thus, long-term preservation can be thought as a required property for future science and engineering, to assure communication over time, so that information that is understood today is transmitted to an unknown system in the future

Bringing self assessment home: repository profiling and key lines of enquiry within DRAMBORA

Digital repositories are a manifestation of complex organizational, financial, legal, technological, procedural, and political interrelationships. Accompanying each of these are innate uncertainties, exacerbated by the relative immaturity of understanding prevalent within the digital preservation domain. Recent efforts have sought to identify core characteristics that must be demonstrable by successful digital repositories, expressed in the form of check-list documents, intended to support the processes of repository accreditation and certification. In isolation though, the available guidelines lack practical applicability; confusion over evidential requirements and difficulties associated with the diversity that exists among repositories (in terms of mandate, available resources, supported content and legal context) are particularly problematic. A gap exists between the available criteria and the ways and extent to which conformity can be demonstrated. The Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) is a methodology for undertaking repository self assessment, developed jointly by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE). DRAMBORA requires repositories to expose their organization, policies and infrastructures to rigorous scrutiny through a series of highly structured exercises, enabling them to build a comprehensive registry of their most pertinent risks, arranged into a structure that facilitates effective management. It draws on experiences accumulated throughout 18 evaluative pilot assessments undertaken in an internationally diverse selection of repositories, digital libraries and data centres (including institutions and services such as the UK National Digital Archive of Datasets, the National Archives of Scotland, Gallica at the National Library of France and the CERN Document Server). Other organizations, such as the British Library, have been using sections of DRAMBORA within their own risk assessment procedures. Despite the attractive benefits of a bottom up approach, there are implicit challenges posed by neglecting a more objective perspective. Following a sustained period of pilot audits undertaken by DPE, DCC and the DELOS Digital Preservation Cluster aimed at evaluating DRAMBORA, it was stated that had respective project members not been present to facilitate each assessment, and contribute their objective, external perspectives, the results may have been less useful. Consequently, DRAMBORA has developed in a number of ways, to enable knowledge transfer from the responses of comparable repositories, and incorporate more opportunities for structured question sets, or key lines of enquiry, that provoke more comprehensive awareness of the applicability of particular threats and opportunities