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

Encoding power: the scripting of archival structures in digital spaces using the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model is a corner stone of the evolving discipline of digital preservation. It undergirds many of the systems that are used in daily practice in organizations engaging in digital preservation, and directly or indirectly influences commercial and open source tools, as well as administrative and personnel functions. Yet it also undergirds the field of digital preservation more generally as its design and revisions have taken place concurrent and in partnership with the growth of the profession into one that has boundaries, curricula, and standards of practice. There is closure around OAIS: it is ever assumed as background or foundational knowledge in new endeavors. It is a black box. Given the pervasiveness of OAIS, this research examines the values scripted into the sociotechnical object it represents. Using discourse analysis, this research traces the power relationships that arise as a result of the discourses that OAIS produces. I also explore the effects on professional practice that occur because of the discourses OAIS brings with it from its scientific origins and archive-informed terminology. The dissertation investigates terms like Designated Community and significant properties in order to lay bare the imperial tendencies scripted within OAIS as well as to expose the resistive and recuperative potential of this technology

The DISTARNET approach to reliable autonomic long-term digital preservation

The rapidly growing production of digital data, together with their increasing importance and consequently essential demands for their longevity, urgently require systems that provide reliable long-term preservation of digital objects. Most importantly, these systems have to ensure guaranteed availability (over a long period of time), as well as integrity, authenticity, and interpretability of the preserved data and their metadata. This means that all kinds of technical problems need to be reliably handled, and that the evolution of data formats is supported. At the same time, systems need to scale with the volume of data to be archived. In this paper, we present DISTARNET, a fully distributed system that provides and reliably executes pre-dened work ows to automatically deal with the aforementioned technical risks. Moreover, DISTARNET is designed as an open system that allows the curators of digital objects to specify new processes to cope with additional challenges (e.g., novel data formats)