If nothing changes then no preservation activities would be needed. However we know that many things change including hardware, software, environment and the knowledge base of the Designated Community.
The PARSE.Insight project collected a large amount of evidence about the threats which the community recognises as important and which must be countered.
A mantra which is often heard in the library world is “emulate or migrate”. This works well for objects for which the semantics can be largely ignored – usually rendered objects which are visually inspected (or read) by humans, in other words documents and images. However this does not work well where semantics is important, for example scientific data and sophisticated/distributed/heterogeneous commercial/business/industrial data.
The CASPAR project collected evidence about techniques which are applicable to the preservation of a large variety – in principle all –types of digitally encoded information. In particular the semantics (meaning) as well as the structure must be captured as parts of the Representation Information. In addition software, including for example emulators, should also be captured.
As noted previously, another part of the plan should be to identify the next in the chain of preservation to hand on to if needed.
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Asset base |
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| Issue | WP/Project/Tools/Services | Asset | Evidence |
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Create plans for preservation |
SCIDIP- Preservation Strategy Toolkit and RepInfo Toolkit. APA/APARSEN website |
SCIDIP-ES software – open source |
CASPAR evidence, SCIDIP-ES user feedback.
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Preservica preservation workflows |
Cloud-based preservation planning |
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SCIDIP-ES orchestration/broker service |
Software to distribute notifications about changes plus information about possible curators and experts |
CASPAR evidence, SCIDIP-ES user feedback.
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PLATO/SCAPE |
Planning tool |
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Evaluate preservation capability |
APARSEN deliverable D14.1 Common Test Environments |
Process for evaluating the capability of disparate systems to perform preservation actions on a wide and diverse set of digital object types. |
[Download not found] & Evaluation spreadsheet |
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Policy-based planning |
APA/APARSEN website with reference to the recommendations of policies able to support the definition of preservation plans |
Collection of user scenarios and suggestions of best practice as well as evidence about preservation efficacy. |
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Dependency management |
CASPAR |
Dependency management framework |
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Preservation planning conceived in terms of performability |
APARSEN WP25 |
Task performability service based on dependency management approach Model and framework for emulators and converters |
Results from the evaluation of the prototype called Epimenides, http://139.91.183.63:8080/epimenides/, developed within WP25 The applicability of the proposed approach has been investigated over the practices and systems of some partners (e.g. DANS in the data archiving domain). |
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Management of persistent identifiers in preservation planning |
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Gaps |
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There are many specialised pieces of RepInfo for which specialised tools would be useful but which do not yet exist. |
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The quantity of differentiated policies implied in the preservation plans must be assessed and made available. |
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Many dependencies, which emerge when exchanging digital objects between different systems and services, are not resolved by standardization. Standards are not widely adopted and sometime discrepant standards are in use in different organizations. More flexible methods for tackling these dependencies and managing intelligibility gaps are needed. |