Brian Aitken

A Collaborative Research Environment for Digital Preservation - The Planets Testbed

There is a vital need to electronically preserve our cultural heritage as well as the digital outcomes of today’s research, arts and humanities. Due to the rapid pace of changes in information technologies, digital data, documents and records are likely to become uninterpretable bit-streams within short periods of time. Digital Preservation deals with the long-term storage, access and maintenance of digital data objects. Preservation experts have proposed an almost overwhelming variety of preservation actions and tools that may help to mitigate this risk but at the same time have disclosed a lack of empirical evidence in the process of informed decision making. In this paper we present the Planets Testbed - a collaborative research environment for scientific experimentation in digital preservation, built in the context of the European Integrated Project Planets. The paper presents the core architectural concepts, components and underlying methodology.

The Planets Testbed

The digital objects that are so fundamental to 21st century life may have a precarious future due to the rapid pace of technological change. Digital preservation specialists have proposed an almost overwhelming variety of preservation actions and tools that may help to mitigate this risk, but there is a lack of empirical evidence to help librarians, archivists and non-specialists to make an informed decision about the most applicable and effective preservation tools. The Planets project has developed a digital preservation Testbed that aims to provide such an evidence-base.

The Life3 Predictive Costing Tool for Digital Collections

Predicting the costs of long-term digital preservation is a crucial yet complex task for even the largest repositories and institutions. For smaller projects and individual researchers faced with preservation requirements, the problem is even more overwhelming, as they lack the accumulated experience of the former. Yet, being able to estimate future preservation costs is vital to answering a range of important questions for each. The LIFE (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) project, which has just completed its third phase, helps institutions and researchers address these concerns, reducing the financial and preservation risks, and allowing decision makers to assess a range of options in order to achieve effective preservation while operating within financial restraints. The project is a collaboration among University College London (UCL), The British Library, and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Funding has been supplied in the United Kingdom by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Research Information Network (RIN).

Content Models for Enhancement and Sustainability: Creating a Generic Framework for Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities

In this paper we describe a framework to increase the accessibility and reuse of objects stored in digital repositories. In many cases digital repositories are created with little consideration to the wider information environment, or the extension of the repository to items beyond the initial collection. The CMES framework emphasizes providing a structure for creating appropriate content models, selecting appropriate metadata schemas, and the need for a modular approach to the creation of a user interface.