Gareth Knight

What to Preserve?: Significant Properties of Digital Objects

This article reports on the JISC/BL/DPC workshop on significant properties, which took place on April 7, 2008 at the British Library Conference Centre, London. The intention of the workshop was to bring together the relevant projects and report on progress to date. It was also hoped that the workshop will lead to collective recommendations for future areas of research and development.

Modelling OAIS Compliance for Disaggregated Preservation Services

The reference model for the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) is well established in the research community as a method of modelling the functions of a digital repository and as a basis in which to frame digital curation and preservation issues. In reference to the 5th anniversary review of the OAIS, it is timely to consider how it may be interpreted by an institutional repository. The paper examines methods of sharing essential functions and requirements of an OAIS between two or more institutions, outlining the practical considerations of outsourcing. It also details the approach taken by the SHERPA DP Project to introduce a disaggregated service model for institutional repositories that wish to implement preservation services.

Cloud repositories for research data – addressing the needs of researchers

This paper describes the problems and explores potential solutions for providing long term storage and access to research outputs, focusing mainly on research data. The ready availability of cloud storage and compute services provides a potentially attractive option for curation and preservation of research information. In contrast to deploying infrastructure within an organisation, which normally requires long lead times and upfront capital investment, cloud infrastructure is available on demand and is highly scalable. However, use of commercial cloud services in particular raises issues of governance, cost-effectiveness, trust and quality of service. We describe a set of in-depth case studies conducted with researchers across the sciences and humanities performing data-intensive research, which demonstrate the issues that need to be considered when preserving data in the cloud. We then describe the design of a repository framework that addresses these requirements. The framework uses hybrid cloud, combining internal institutional storage, cloud storage and cloud-based preservation services into a single integrated repository infrastructure. Allocation of content to storage providers is performed using on a rules-based approach. The results of an evaluation of the proof-of-concept system are described.

Kindura - archiving with iRODS clouds

We present the architecture and design of a cloudy data infrastructure for archiving and backup. By reducing the cloud elasticity, we are able to build a more cost effective service for archiving. DuraSpace and Fedora provide friendly frontends for users. We have investigated several options for the back end, focusing currently on a federated iRODS infrastructure which will permit automatic replication and metadata extraction. All services will appear as “cloud-like”, even internal ones – it is thus a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of the commercial/external (public) cloud with an institutional/consortium (private/community) cloud. This project will provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) components, via storage and compute services, but more importantly it will combine these, using DuraCloud and Fedora as enabling technologies, to provide an integrated Software-asa-Service (SaaS) package of repository-centric services. While this is work in progress, we can already present the results In future work, DuraCloud will be extended to broker between the clouds.

Report on the “Digital Preservation - The Planets Way” Workshop

A report on the Planets a “Digital Preservation – The Planets Way” workshop, which took place on June 22-24, 2009 at the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark. The workshop brought together representatives from archives, libraries, museums, academia, media and other institutions to consider the activities necessary to maintain content in the long-term and establish the methodologies and software tools developed by the EU-funded PLANETS project as a potential solution for preservation concerns. The event was the first of a series of three-day workshops that the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) project is organizing across Europe during 2009-2010.