Digital Preservation: Logical and bit-stream preservation using Plato, EPrints and the Cloud

Abstract

The rapid technological changes in today's information landscape have considerably turned the preservation of digital information into a pressing challenge. The aim of an institutional repository has evolved in the last decade from the simple need to provide material with a persistent online home, to an infrastructure that facilitates services on complex collections of digital objects. Digital librarians have long acknowledged the preservation function as a vital back office service that is central to the role of repository. However, preservation is often sidelined due to the practical constraints of running a repository. Dealing with institutional-scale ingests and quality assurance with minimal staff and investment rarely leaves sufficient capacity for engaging with a preservation agenda. A lot of different strategies, i.e. preservation actions, have been proposed to tackle this challenge: migration and emulation are the most prominent ones. However, which strategy to choose, and subsequently which tools to select to implement it, poses significant challenges. The creation of a concrete plan for preserving an institution's collection of digital objects requires the evaluation of possible preservation solutions against clearly defined and measurable criteria. This tutorial shows attendees the latest facilities in the EPrints open source repository platform for dealing with preservation tasks in a practical and achievable way, and new mechanisms for integrating the repository with the cloud and the user desktop, in order to be able to offer a trusted and managed storage solution to end users. Furthermore, attendees will create a preservation plan on the basis of a representative scenario and receive an accountable and informed recommendation for a particular preservation action. The whole preservation planning process will be supported by Plato, a decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning approach and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours. The benefit of this tutorial is the grounding of digital curation advice and theory into achievable good practice that delivers helpful services to end users for their familiar personal desktop environments and new cloud services