A Foundation for Automatic Digital Preservation

Abstract

Proposes a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to help cultural heritage institutions to accomplish automatic digital preservation. At Minho University, Portugal, research is being undertaken to devise new pathways to carry out the three main activities of digital preservation in an automated fashion (selection of migration options, conversion, evaluation). Current activities are focused on the development of an SOA that, by combining input from different distributed applications, enables client institutions to preserve collections of digital material automatically. Describes the set of components that are necessary to build an SOA to enable cultural heritage institutions to carry out digital preservation with minimum human intervention and shows how the proposed SOA enables institutions to cooperate in the establishment of a global advisory service that will be capable of producing recommendations of optimal migration options, perform format migrations and thoroughly document preservation interventions by generating appropriate preservation metadata. Although a prototype for this SOA is still under development, some conclusions can already be drawn, namely that the set of digital objects used to train the recommendation system should be as heterogeneous as possible in terms of shape and size and should contain at least a few thousand objects. (Quotes from original text)