RSP Summer School 2008

Wednesday 18th to Friday 20th June 2008, Thornton Manor, The Wirral, Cheshire

Original Event Details | Programme | Participants | Venue | Photographs

The preservation session at the 2008 summer school explored new ground in the RSP's ongoing coverage of this topic for repository managers, taking on expanded storage and highlighting some emerging solutions for the easy movement of data between storage and repository systems. These notes are intended to accompany the presentation slides

Preservation Session Summary

Digital preservation involves long-term planning and can become quite technical, particularly in terms of managing formats and preservation metadata. Here we considered a broader and more immediate perspective, the origins of a range of types of digital data, from personal materials such as photographs and music, to materials found within digital libraries including, of course, repositories.

This leads to a flip in expectations, from scarcity of content experienced by many IRs, to data proliferation, which characterises production of digital data. For many repositories this calls for a review of strategy towards large-scale storage. In addition, in considering different data types we became aware of the need to be careful of trying to fix digital data as though it were some physical artefact. This is the new conundrum faced by digital preservation. We don't want to be the equivalent of Spike Milligan's Goons character Eccles trying to write down the time. Different data types can have different preservation needs and may be handled differently, as revealed in the breakout group work.

The good news is there are some emerging tools and services that can help. Massive storage services are becoming available, and storage controllers are being developed to move content from different repository types, e.g. EPrints, Fedora, to various storage platforms. It is becoming easier to manage data between repository types with the emergence of OAI-ORE, as is shown in a video in the presentation. Prospective preservation service providers are beginning to appear, and some may be promising for repositories. As long as we have a commitment to use open technologies then we should have the flexibility to solve the problems.

Extended discussions in the breakout groups and in consequent feedback curtailed the latter part of the presentation. This surveys a series of tools that can help with digital preservation. One of the most promising tools is Plato, the Preservation Planning Tool from the Planets project. One of the easiest to use is the OpenDOAR policy tool, a forms-based approach that prompts thinking about basic preservation by embedding it within wider repository policy considerations. The other tools covered are more specialised and involve lengthier consideration - format validation (JHOVE), repository auditing (DRAMBORA), and metadata extraction (NLNZ Metadata Extractor Tool) - and might be seen as part of a wider support package.

The computer hardware used to create digital data will inevitably be dumped, and application software will eventually be superseded; the more commercial and immediate the need, the faster the cycle. We must use digital preservation approaches to make sure this is not the fate of our data too.

Contact

For further information on this event, please email support@rsp.ac.uk or phone 0845 257 6860.

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