Digital Preservation Planning: Principles, Examples and the Future with Planets.

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Abstracts

Introduction to Planets
Andreas Rauber, University of Vienna

Planets is a four-year pan-European project funded by the European Commission under its Sixth Framework Programme. From 2010, Planets will provide a common framework to underpin digital preservation activity in Europe and a downloadable software package to substantially automate the preservation process. Coordinated by the British Library, it draws on the expertise of 16 national libraries and archives, research institutions and technology companies in Europe. This presentation introduces workshop participants to the project and its technology, key features of the Planets framework and the tools and services that the project will deliver. [PDF, 1.3MB]

Constructing a Preservation Policy: the case of the UK Data Archive
Matthew Woollard, UKDA

This presentation will focus on the practical considerations surrounding the informed evolution of a preservation policy in a mature service. The UK Data Archive has been acquiring, ingesting, disseminating and preserving social science data on behalf of the Economic and Social Research Council for over 40 years. The first formal preservation policy was published in 2003 and revised in 2005. These versions of the policy were informed more by internal practice than by outside influences. A complete revision of the policy occured in late 2007 and a new policy has been written and is in the process of implementation. This presentation outlines the main influences on the redefinition of this policy and some of the decision-making processes which have led to it. [PDF, 378KB]

Going Digital: The Case of the Wellcome Library
Natalie Walters, Wellcome Library

The Wellcome Library collects material relating to the history of medicine and associated disciplines. Increasingly this material is produced in digital form, and traditional methods of collecting and storage are unsuitable. In order to try and deal with the issues raised by working with digital material, in 2005 the Library began a project called Digital Curation in Action. This is a long term project looking at how we manage born digital material, and how we integrate this with our physical collections to create a hybrid archive. Right from the beginning we have been working with real material, with the practical aspects of this being supported by utilising and adapting traditional archival principles.

This presentation discusses our experiences of working with born digital material, and the approach taken by the Wellcome Library whereby Archivists are taking the lead in this. It will also include a progress report on the procurement of our Digital Object Repository, which is currently ongoing. [PDF, 481KB]

Preservation Planning Workflow (Part 1)
Christoph Becker, University of Vienna

How do you determine which preservation strategy will be most suitable to meet the requirements of particular digital content and their users? This session examines the process involved in planning the preservation of digital objects. The planning workflow defines the basic context and representative sample objects for the collection at hand, describes the requirements and the significant properties of the objects, discovers available strategies, tests the chosen options and evaluates the outcomes to arrive at a recommendation on how to treat the digital objects. Participants will be introduced to Plato, the Planets digital preservation tool, which supports and automates the workflow. [PDF, 1.5MB]

Preservation Planning Workflow (Part 2)
Christoph Becker, University of Vienna

This practical workshop will provide first-hand experience of working with the Plato tool. Participants will take part in creating objective trees which help to define the relevant characteristics and requirements of digital content and to structure these into a preservation planning specification. Using a prepared objective tree, participants will import this into Plato to see how the software works with real-life content to arrive at a preservation plan, using sample content for conducting experiments. [PDF, 1.3MB]

Characterisation
Manfred Thaller at the University of Cologne

Extracting characteristics from files is the base line for the automatic handling of a number of important steps in preservation, notably when connected to the evaluation of the quality of migration tools and the automated evaluation of migrations. Planets produces a consistently dynamic approach here, which uses two formal languages to (a) translate format specifications into a machine interpretable language, which allows general purpose software to extract properties from a large number of file formats, and, (b) to map the content of files encoded in a different model into a common content model, which allows automated comparison of the content of two files encoded in different file formats. This presentation concludes with some initial remarks, how this approach can be extended to cover rendering characteristics, which do NOT reside in the files themselves. [PDF, 3.5MB]

Planets Testbed
Matthew Barr, HATII

The preservation of digital objects requires specific software tools and services. These can be characterisation tools that abstract the essential characteristics of a digital object from a file, migration tools that convert digital objects to different formats, or emulation tools that render digital objects in their original context on a new infrastructure. The Planets Testbed provides a controlled environment where preservation tools can be tested and evaluated, and where experiment results can be empirically compared. This presentation will provide a high-level overview and demonstration of the Testbed application and how it will operate in practice. [PDF, 703KB]