Publications beginning with 'A'

This report is the final version of the Planets guidelines for developers of digital preservation tools. The guidelines set out Planets’ requirements for integrating third-party tools into the Planets framework. Developers will find them useful in understanding the criteria, tools and services should meet to be considered for inclusion in Planets. [PDF, 118KB]

Planets is developing a service-oriented environment for the definition and evaluation of preservation strategies for human-centric data. It focuses on the question of logically preserving digital materials, as opposed to the physical preservation of content bit-streams. This includes the development of preservation tools for the automated characterization, migration, and comparison of different types of digital objects as well as the emulation of their original runtime environment in order to ensure long-time access and interpretability.
The Planets integrated environment provides a number of end-user applications that allow data curators to execute and scientifically evaluate preservation experiments based on composable preservation services. Focus of this paper is on the middleware and programming model and on showing how it can be utilized in order to create complex preservation workflows.

Rainer Schmidt, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, gave this presentation at iPres 2009, 5-6 October 2009, in San Francisco, California. [PDF, 441KB]

This paper describesa service-oriented environment develped by Planets for the definition and evaluation of preservation strategies for human-centric data. It focuses on the question of logically preserving digital materials, as opposed to the physical preservation of content bit-streams. This includes the development of preservation tools for the automated characterization, migration, and comparison of different types of digital objects as well as the emulation of their original runtime environment in order to ensure long-time access and interpretability.
The Planets integrated environment provides a number of end-user applications that allow data curators to execute and scientifically evaluate preservation experiments based on composable preservation services. Focus of this paper is on the middleware and programming model and on showing how it can be utilized in order to create complex preservation workflows.

The paper was presented by Rainer Schmidt, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, at iPres 2009, 5-6 October 2009, in San Francisco, California. [PDF, 1004KB]

Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology, Austria, gave a presentation at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2008 in Ceará, Brazil, on 20 March 2008.
The presentation describes the eXtensible Characterisation Languages (XCL) that support the automatic validation of document conversions and the evaluation of migration quality by hierarchically decomposing a document and representing documents from different sources in an abstract XML language. The context of the development of these languages and tools are presented and the overall concept and features of the languages and how they can be applied to the evaluation of digital preservation solutions are described. [PDF, 1040KB]

The dominance of digital objects in today’s information landscape has changed the way humankind creates and exchanges information. However, it has also brought an entirely new problem: the longevity of digital objects. Due to the fast changes in technologies, digital documents have a short lifespan before they become obsolete. Digital preservation, i.e. actions to ensure longevity of digital information, thus has become a pressing challenge. Different strategies such as migration and emulation have been proposed; however, the decision between available tools for format migration is very complex. Preservation planning supports decision makers in reaching accountable decisions by evaluating potential strategies against well-defined requirements. Especially the evaluation of different migration tools for digital preservation has to rely on validating the converted objects and thus on an analysis of the logical structure and the content of documents.

This paper presents the eXtensible Characterisation Languages (XCL) that support the automatic validation of document conversions and the evaluation of migration quality by hierarchically decomposing a document and representing documents from different sources in an abstract XML language. We present the context of the development of these languages and tools and describe the overall concept and features of the languages and how they can be applied to the evaluation of digital preservation solutions.

The paper was presented at the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, held on March 16-20 2008 in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil.

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This document contains an XML-based language to describe the properties of preservation action tools and their context of use. Within the Planets project this language can serve as a means of communication between a preservation planning system and a tools registry. The schema definition can also serve as a generic model for the description of the functions, expected performance outcomes, and appropriate uses of preservation action tools. [PDF, 437KB]

This presentation was given by Helen Hockx-Yu, The British Library, at the iPres 2007 conference which took place on October 11-12 2007 in Beijing, China.

The presentation gives an overview of Planets, its aims and objectives, and involved partners. It also lists the partners' motivations for being involved in the project, and provides a status report for progress to date. Finally, the presentation describes to two user scenarios, and mentions a number of goals to be reached by the end of 2008. [PDF, 316KB]

Rainer Schmidt (Austrian Research Centers) presented recent developments on a Job Submission Service that is based on standard grid mechanisms and capable of providing a large cluster of virtual machines. He also presented experimental results conducted on the Amazon EC2 and S3 utility cloud infrastructure.
The presentation was selected as ‘Best Paper’ at INTENSIVE 2009, which was held in Valencia, Spain on 20-25 April 2009.
[PDF, 263KB]

Digital libraries are increasingly relying on distributed services to support increasingly complex tasks such as retrieval or preservation.
While there is a growing body of services for migrating digital objects into safer formats to ensure their long-term accessability, the quality of these services is often unknown. Moreover, emulation as the major alternative preservation strategy is often neglected due to the complex setup procedures that are necessary for testing emulation. However, thorough evaluation of the complete set of potential strategies in a quantified and repeatable way is considered of vital importance for trustworthy decision making in digital preservation planning.
This paper presents a preservation action monitoring infrastructure that combines provider-side service instrumentation and quality measurement of migration web services with remote access to emulation.
Tools are monitored during execution, and both their runtime characteristics and the quality of their results are measured transparently. The architecture of the presented framework is described and the results from experiments on migration and emulation services are discussed.

Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology, presented the paper at ECDL 2009, Sept. 27 - Oct. 2 in Corfu, Greece. The paper is published in the proceedings from the conference, LNCS, by Springer-Verlag.

In: M. Agosti et al. (Eds.): ECDL 2009, LNCS 5714, pp. 39–50, 2009, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 [PDF, 1089KB]

Digital libraries are increasingly relying on distributed services to support increasingly complex tasks such as retrieval or preservation.
While there is a growing body of services for migrating digital objects into safer formats to ensure their long-term accessability, the quality of these services is often unknown. Moreover, emulation as the major alternative preservation strategy is often neglected due to the complex setup procedures that are necessary for testing emulation. However, thorough evaluation of the complete set of potential strategies in a quantified and repeatable way is considered of vital importance for trustworthy decision making in digital preservation planning.
A preservation action monitoring infrastructure that combines provider-side service instrumentation and quality measurement of migration web services with remote access to emulation is presented.
Tools are monitored during execution, and both their runtime characteristics and the quality of their results are measured transparently. The architecture of the presented framework is described and the results from experiments on migration and emulation services are discussed.

Christoph Becker, Vienna University of Technology, gave this presentation at ECDL 2009, Sept. 27 - Oct. 2 in Corfu, Greece. [PDF, 1250KB]

This paper describes a proposal for a logical data model based on preliminary work within the Planets project. In OAIS terms the main areas discussed are related to the introduction of a logical data model for representing the past, present and future versions of the digital object associated with the Archival Storage Package for the publications deposited by our client repositories.

The paper was presented by Eld Zierau at ECDL 2008 which was held in Aarhus, Denmark, on 14-19 September 2008 [PDF, 183KB]

The presentation was made by Jean-Marc Comment, Swiss Federal Archives, at the ICA 2008 Congress in Kuala Lumpur, 21-27 July 2008. The presentation gives an introduction to "SIARD" which is a new long-term preservation format for a Software-Independent Archiving of Relational Database. [PDF, 242KB]

This paper presents the results of a survey of national libraries, archives and other content-holding organisations in Europe which the Planets project undertook in early 2009 to better understand the organisations’ digital preservation activities and needs and to ensure that Planets’ technology and services are designed to meet them. Over 200 responses were received including a cross-section of major libraries and archives especially in Europe. The results provide a snapshot of organisations’ readiness to preserve digital collections for the future.
The survey revealed a high level of awareness of the challenges of digital preservation within organisations. Findings indicated that approximately half of those organisations surveyed have taken measures to develop digital preservation policies and to budget for it, while a majority have incorporated digital preservation into their organisational planning.
Organisations predict that within a decade they will need to store large quantities of data in a wide range of formats from a variety of sources; three quarters of them are looking to invest in a solution within the next two years. However, the findings also point to varying degrees of readiness.
Organisations with a digital preservation policy are significantly further advanced in their work to preserve digital collections for the long-term than others.

The paper was presented by Robert Sharpe, Tessella, at iPres 2009, 5-6 October 2009, in San Francisco, California. [PDF, 194KB]

In early 2009 Planets conducted an on-line survey of people with an interest in digital preservation. In particular, national libraries and archives in Europe were targeted. The survey had a relatively large number of responses (over 200), approximately two fifths were from libraries and a third from archives.
This talk presents the outcomes of the survey and the key lessons that can be drawn from this study and applied in institutions. In particular, it will examine the questions institutions need to ask themselves as digital preservation starts to move away from being a craft towards becoming a deployable, scalable reality. In short, are you ready?

The presentation relates to the paper Are you ready? Assessing Whether Organizations are Prepared for Digital Preservation and was given by Robert Sharpe, Tessella, at iPres 2009, 5-6 October 2009, in San Francisco, California. [PDF, 118KB]

Robert Sharpe, Tessella, gave a presentation on Preservation Characterization at the Tools & Trends conference at National Library of the Netherlands on 1-2 November 2007.

The presentation touches upon the ways files and records can be characterized for preservation, but it also points to problems that may arise in the process. However, it also points to a solution and indicates that Planets will be able to make a difference. [PDF, 91KB]