Angela Dappert

Significance is in the eye of the stakeholder

Custodians of digital content take action when the material that they are responsible for is threatened by, for example, obsolescence or deterioration. At first glance, ideal preservation actions retain every aspect of the original objects with the highest level of fidelity. Achieving this goal can, however, be costly, infeasible, and sometimes even undesirable. As a result, custodians must focus their attention on preserving the most significant characteristics of the content, even at the cost of sacrificing less important ones. The concept of significant characteristics has become prominent within the digital preservation community to capture this key goal. As is often the case in an emerging field, however, the term has become over-loaded and remains ill-defined. In this paper, we unpack the meaning that lies behind the phrase, analyze the domain, and introduce clear terminology.

Modelling Organizational Preservation Goals to Guide Digital Preservation

Summary This paper is an extended and updated version of the work reported at iPres 2008. Digital preservation activities can only succeed if they go beyond the technical properties of digital objects. They must consider the strategy, policy, goals, and constraints of the institution that undertakes them and take into account the cultural and institutional framework in which data, documents and records are preserved. Furthermore, because organizations differ in many ways, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be appropriate. Fortunately, organizations involved in digital preservation have created documents describing their policies, strategies, work-flows, plans, and goals to provide guidance. They also have skilled staff who are aware of sometimes unwritten considerations. Within Planets (Farquhar & Hockx-Yu, 2007), a four-year project co-funded by the European Union to address core digital preservation challenges, we have analyzed preservation guiding documents and interviewed staff from libraries, archives, and data centres that are actively engaged in digital preservation. This paper introduces a conceptual model for expressing the core concepts and requirements that appear in preservation guiding documents. It defines a specific vocabulary that institutions can reuse for expressing their own policies and strategies. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, the model and vocabulary support automated preservation planning tools through an XML representation 1 .

Describing and Preserving Digital Object Environments

A digital object is not usable without a computing environment in which it can be rendered or executed. If we want to ensure the long-term usability of digital objects, so that they can be used in the face of changing formats, software, and hardware, it is necessary to either preserve their computing environments or to, at least, gather enough information, so that the computing environment can be reconstructed or adapted to a changed world. Digital preservation metadata is the information that is needed in order to preserve digital objects successfully in the long-term so that they can be deployed in some form in the future. Information that describes the sufficient components of the digital objects computing environment has to be part of its preservation metadata. Although there are semantic units for recording environment information in the de-facto standard for digital preservation metadata, PREMIS, these semantic units have rarely, if ever, been used. Prompted by increasing interest in the description of computing environments, this article describes requirements and solution proposals for defining an improved metadata description for computing environments.

Implementing Metadata that Guide Digital Preservation Services

Effective digital preservation depends on a set of preservation services that work together to ensure that digital objects can be preserved for the long-term. These services need digital preservation metadata, in particular, descriptions of the properties that digital objects may have and descriptions of the requirements that guide digital preservation services. This paper analyzes how these services interact and use these metadata and develops a data dictionary to support them.

Services That Enable Integration And Cross-Linking Across Different Types Of Identifiers And Data Types

This report summarises progress for disciplinary cross-linking of identifier systems and the results obtained from the perspective of each THOR project partner organisation, in particular disciplinary data repositories. We describe requirements, results, and challenges informed by implementations in the life sciences, earth and environmental sciences, and high-energy physics.

An Introduction to Implementing Digital Preservation Metadata

This chapter gives an end-to-end overview of the steps involved in determining what information one needs to keep, together with one’s digital assets, so that they can be understood and used in the long term. In other words, what digital preservation metadata is required, and how does one decide this? This includes risk and functional analysis to define the context-specific metadata requirements; applying best-practice frameworks, such as OAIS, PREMIS, or SPOT to choose and structure the required metadata; deriving a data model for a variety of content types, such as web archives, audio-visual materials, or e-books; determining the associated events, agent, rights, and computing environment information; choosing the best serialization method; combining multiple metadata standards; taking advantage of existing tools; and applying conformance considerations. The narrative links to the chapters in the book Digital Preservation Metadata for Practitioners-Implementing PREMIS.

How to Develop a Digital Preservation Metadata Profile: Risk and Requirements Analysis

There is no off-the-shelf solution when implementing preservation metadata. Standards such as the OAIS information model are a general guidance that lists the main information families that need to be expressed; closer to implementation, the PREMIS Data Dictionary provides core information elements that can accommodate a wide range of contexts, providing general implementation guidance. As such, these guidelines need to be tailored to specific needs so that the implemented preservation metadata supports all relevant requirements, making the most appropriate decisions in a constrained context. This chapter proposes important questions that help to break down the task into more manageable subtasks. Risk-oriented frameworks, such as the SPOT model, are efficient tools to start a requirement analysis for digital preservation metadata.

An Introduction to the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Digital Preservation Metadata

The PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata provides a comprehensive and widely implemented specification that is revised based on concrete experience and changing technological environments. In addition, it gives the preservation community a common data model for organizing and thinking about the information you need to preserve digital objects. It has become the de facto standard for preservation metadata and is built into many preservation repository systems, both open-source and commercial, such that essential preservation activities can be accomplished. This chapter reviews the development of PREMIS, now in version 3.0, its supporting maintenance activity, its goals, principles and scope, its relationship to OAIS, and it introduces the features of the Data Dictionary. As a shared community standard the PREMIS Data Dictionary is flexible, extensible, and provides for interoperability among repositories of digital objects, systems that support the preservation process, and data that are exchanged and reused.

How to Develop a Digital Preservation Metadata Profile: Data Modeling

Digital preservation metadata profiles vary because of different content types held in the repository, different functions performed on them, different organizational mandates and processes, different policies, different technical platforms, and other reasons. Because of this, one important step in their development is the definition of a logical data model. The logical data model declares the key context-specific entities for which metadata needs to be created, the relationships between them, and the specific metadata properties that should be captured for them. This chapter describes the principles of how to create a logical data model. Chapters 5 through 12 go on to present a number of case studies that illustrate how specific data model issues have been decided for different entity types, for different content types, such as web archives, audiovisual or e-book materials, and for different organization types.

Digital Preservation Metadata Practice for Computing Environments

A digital object does not stand alone. We require a computing environment in order to render, interact with, or understand it. Over the long term, the computing environments that we use change dramatically so that the software, hardware, and formats that we once used are no longer widely available or even understood. Therefore, if we want to ensure the long-term usability of digital objects, it is necessary to either preserve their computing environments or at least bring together enough information so that the environment can be reconstructed or adapted to a changed world. Information that describes the components of the digital object’s computing environment is a key part of its preservation metadata. The need becomes even more acute as we strive to archive audiovisual files, web pages with JavaScript and Flash, office documents and spreadsheets that embed complex calculations, or research outputs with data and software. Fortunately, widespread use of emulators and virtual machines and improved focus on managing software dependencies give us options that we have not had in the past. Prompted by this growing demand, PREMIS version 3.0 (PREMIS Editorial Committee (2015) [1]) has changed the way computing environment information is recorded. The new approach greatly improves expressiveness and consistency. This chapter describes the basic concepts.