Hannes Kulovits

Systematic planning for digital preservation: evaluating potential strategies and building preservation plans

A number of approaches have been proposed for the problem of digital preservation, and the number of tools offering solutions is steadily increasing. However, the decision making procedures are still largely ad-hoc actions. Especially, the process of selecting the most suitable preservation action tool as one of the key issues in preservation planning has not been sufficiently standardised in practice. The Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) model and corresponding criteria catalogues for trustworthy repositories specify requirements that such a process should fulfill, but do not provide concrete guidance. This article describes a systematic approach for evaluating potential alternatives for preservation actions and building thoroughly defined, accountable preservation plans for keeping digital content alive over time. In this approach, preservation planners empirically evaluate potential action components in a controlled environment and select the most suitable one with respect to the particular requirements of a given setting. The method follows a variation of utility analysis to support multi-criteria decision making procedures in digital preservation planning. The selection procedure leads to well-documented, well-argued and transparent decisions that can be reproduced and revisited at a later point of time. We describe the context and foundation of the approach, discuss the definition of a preservation plan and describe the components that we consider necessary to constitute a solid and complete preservation plan. We then describe a repeatable workflow for accountable decision making in preservation planning. We analyse and discuss experiences in applying this workflow in case studies. We further set the approach in relation to the OAIS model and show how it supports criteria for trustworthy repositories. Finally, we present a planning tool supporting the workflow and point out directions for future research.

Plato: a service oriented decision support system for preservation planning

The fast changes of technologies in todays information landscape have considerably shortened the lifespan of digital objects. Digital preservation has become a pressing challenge. Different strategies such as migration and emulation have been proposed; however, the decision for a specific tool e.g. for format migration or an emulator is very complex. The process of evaluating potential solutions against specific requirements and building a plan for preserving a given set of objects is called preservation planning. So far, it is a mainly manual, sometimes ad-hoc process with little or no tool support. This paper presents a service-oriented architecture and decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning process and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.

From TIFF to JPEG 2000?: Preservation Planning at the Bavarian State Library Using a Collection of Digitized 16th Century Printings

Studies and user reports claim JPEG 2000 to be – or at least will become – the next archiving format for digital images [1]. The format offers new possibilities, such as streaming, and reduces storage consumption through lossless and lossy compression [2]. Another often claimed advantage of JPEG 2000 is that the master image can possibly serve as the access copy as well, and thus replace derived compressed, low resolution access copies. The National Library of the Netherlands (KB-NL) evaluated the suitability of alternative file formats such as JPEG 2000 to their currently used format uncompressed TIFF. The four aspects, required storage capacity, image quality, long-term sustainability and functionality were analysed and JPEG 2000 is recommended as future archive format [3]. The British Library recently moved forward to migrate their 80-terabyte newspaper collection from TIFF to JPEG 2000 [4] and the Wellcome Library announced they will use JPEG 2000 for their upcoming digitization projects [16].

Adding quality-awareness to evaluate migration web-services and remote emulation for digital preservation

Digital libraries are increasingly relying on distributed services to support increasingly complex tasks such as retrieval or preservation. While there is a growing body of services for migrating digital objects into safer formats to ensure their long-term accessability, the quality of these services is often unknown. Moreover, emulation as the major alternative preservation strategy is often neglected due to the complex setup procedures that are necessary for testing emulation. However, thorough evaluation of the complete set of potential strategies in a quantified and repeatable way is considered of vital importance for trustworthy decision making in digital preservation planning. This paper presents a preservation action monitoring infrastructure that combines provider-side service instrumentation and quality measurement of migration web services with remote access to emulation. Tools are monitored during execution, and both their runtime characteristics and the quality of their results are measured transparently. We present the architecture of the presented framework and discuss results from experiments on migration and emulation services.

An Extensible Monitoring Framework for Measuring and Evaluating Tool Performance in a Service-Oriented Architecture

The lack of QoS attributes and their values is still one of the fundamental drawbacks of web service technology. Most approaches for modelling and monitoring QoS and web service performance focus either on client-side measurement and feedback of QoS attributes, or on ranking and discovery, developing extensions of the standard web service discovery models. However, in many cases, provider-side measurement can be of great additional value to aid the evaluation and selection of services and underlying implementations. We present a generic architecture and reference implementation for non-invasive provider-side instrumentation of data-processing tools exposed as QoS-aware web services, where real-time quality information is obtained through an extensible monitoring framework. In this architecture, dynamically configurable execution engines measure QoS attributes and instrument the corresponding web services on the provider side. We demonstrate the application of this framework to the task of performance monitoring of a variety of applications on different platforms, thus enriching the services with real-time QoS information, which is accumulated in an experience base.

Plato: A Preservation Planning Tool Integrating Preservation Action Services

The creation of a concrete plan for preserving a collection of digital objects of a specific institution necessitates the evaluation of available solutions against clearly defined and measurable criteria. This process is called preservation planning and aids in the decision making process to find the most suitable preservation strategy considering the institutions requirements, the planning context and available actions applicable to the objects contained in the repository. Performed manually, this evaluation promises to be hard and tedious work, inasmuch as there exist numerous potential preservation action tools of different quality. In this demonstration, we present Plato [4], an interactive software tool aimed at creating preservation plans.

Evaluating a process for developing a capability maturity model

Maturity Models have been proven to be powerful tools to assess to current state of an organization regarding a certain aspect and drive improvement. However, maturity models are often developed ad hoc, without following a well-documented design and development method, and often do not provide a pathway to further extend and update the model to foster systematic enhancements and extensions. This paper discusses a systematic approach to maturity model development and applies it to the concrete domain of long-term information management. We trace the steps from problem definition to maturity model evaluation and apply the maturity model to a specific organizational scenario.

Plato: a preservation planning tool

Creating a concrete plan for preserving an institutions collection of digital objects requires the evaluation of available solutions against clearly defined and measurable criteria. Preservation planning aids in this decision making process to find the best preservation strategy considering the institutions requirements, the planning context and possible actions applicable to the objects contained in the repository. Performed manually, this evaluation of possible solutions against requirements takes a good deal of time and effort. In this demonstration, we present Plato, an interactive software tool aimed at creating preservation plans.