Objectives

Develop brokerage services required for preservation of digital holdings

Description of work and role of partners

Task 3410 Brokerage of data holdings

Research and develop ways in which repositories can come to agreement about handing on their data holdings in case a repository can no longer preserve its holdings and needs to hand them on. An implementation could for example be based on the CASPAR Orchestration Manager [26]. The aim would be to allow those holding data to register any which they believe they may not be able to afford to maintain. Other repositories have the opportunity to offer to host that data. For example they may have spare storage capacity and similar designated communities.

ESA has had experience of this type of brokerage operating in an ad-hoc manner, when it knows it has funding for particular dataset for a limited time after the end of the Earth Observation satellite project which produced it.

Task 3420 Brokerage of hardware and software

In this task we will research and develop ways in which organisations can share information about the availability of hardware and software. This would be useful in the case that a repository has physical media such as tapes or removable disks which it can no longer read, or datasets for which they no longer have software needed to process it. The simplest implementation would be a registration system which allows those who need that hardware or software to flag that requirement; those with such information could respond. For both tasks a more pro-active system would try to actively match those in need with whose with a supply.