About the Preservation Health Check Pilot
The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and OCLC Research are conducting a preservation health check pilot that runs from July 2012 to July 2013.
The pilot will analyse the quality of preservation metadata created and in use by operational repository and deposit systems and evaluate the potential of such metadata for assessing digital preservation risks.
OPF, representing the digital preservation community needs, will contribute pilot sites and datasets, provide feed-back to interim-research findings and organize workshops/hackathons to disseminate and advance the take-up of research findings.
OCLC Research, with expertise in preservation metadata and skills in risk assessment, will design the research methodology, carry out the research activities, provide the technical infrastructure, develop data analysis tools & risk assessment methods and contribute to the dissemination of results.
Other parties will be involved during the pilot, in particular maintainers of preservation metadata schemas (LoC), format registration tools (UK National Archive) and risk assessment tools (DCC, NARA, NESTOR).
Community need for regular risk assessment
An important function of preservation metadata is to understand what exactly is in the repository and to provide information that enables periodic check-ups and screenings for risks to long-term access. Several schemas (PREMIS, MIXED, etc.), best practices, tools and registries (PRONOM, JHOVE, DROID, UDFR, etc.) for preservation metadata have been developed, in the past 15 years, and are in use by most repositories. Preservation risk assessment toolkits and checklists (DRAMBORA, TRAC, etc.) and standards (Metrics for digital repository audit and certification, CCSDS 2009, etc.) have been devised to help repositories assess the preservation risks they run. However there is little evidence that such risk assessment has become a part of the preservation management process of repositories and that assessment results are fed back into the development of standards, best practices and tools.
OPF, which represents major libraries and archives with a long-term access mandate, has identified a shared need for supporting repositories in carrying out their preservation management tasks. One of these tasks is to perform regular preservation risk assessment (health check), a task that could be offered as a service, independently from specific repository systems in use.
Pilot Results
The pilot will deliver individual preservation health-check reports (not public) to the pilot sites and an overall public report with recommendations on:
a) the value and usefulness of preservation metadata;
b) the necessary measures and steps to improve the quality of preservation metadata;
c) the necessary measures to improve the quality of tools in use;
d) the need for regular health checks, based on preservation metadata;
e) the basic parameters/pre-conditions for setting-up a preservation health check service.
Interim results will be published on the OCLC Research and OPF web pages.
Pilot events
The Preservation Health Check pilot will hold a workshop at iPRES2012, as part of the PREMIS Implementation Fair. For more information please go to: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/x/LIDi
Email [email protected] if you have any queries about the pilot.