Preservation Health Check: Monitoring Threats to Digital Repository Content presents the preliminary findings of Phase 1 of our Preservation Health Check investigation of preservation monitoring and suggests that there is an opportunity to use PREMIS preservation metadata as an evidence base to support a threat assessment exercise based on the Simple Property-Oriented Threat (SPOT) model.Key highlights:There is a need for digital preservation repositories to perform periodic "health checks" as a routine part of preservation activitiesPreservation Health Check activities serve the day-to-day planning and operations of digital repositoriesA certain level of predictability and harmonization is necessary for threat assessment applications that rely on automated data evaluationAnalysis reveals a variety of gaps in current preservation metadata coverage, which might be filled by other metadata schemaFindings suggest an opportunity to use PREMIS preservation metadata as an evidence base to support a threat assessment exerciseThe results of preservation actions (PREMIS Events) represent a crucial part of the information needed for assessment—whether this information is under the direct control of the repository itself, or whether it is created and maintained by parties external to the repository.The flexibility of the PREMIS standard allows for a large diversity in implementations and leaves much room for encoding relevant metadata in other formats and schemas—all of which impedes the implementation of a threat assessment logic that generalizes over many repositories. This report will be of interest to digital repository managers, digital preservation practitioners, and PREMIS implementers
