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In this paper, we discuss innovations by the Archivematica project as a response to the experiences of early implementers and informed by the greater archival, library, digital humanities and digital forensics communities. The Archivematica system is an implementation of the ISO-OAIS functional model and is designed to maintain standards-based, long-term access to collections of digital objects. Early deployments have revealed some limitations of the ISO-OAIS model in the areas of appraisal, arrangement, description, and preservation planning. The Archivematica project has added requirements intended to fill those gaps to its development roadmap for its micro-services architecture and web-based dashboard. Research and development is focused on managing indexed backlogs of transferred digital acquisitions, creating a SIP from a transfer or set of transfers, developing strategies for preserving email, and receiving updates about new normalization paths via a format policy registry (FPR).

Is software obsolescence a significant risk? To explore this issue, we analysed a corpus of over 2.5 billion resources cor- responding to the UK Web domain, as crawled between 1996 and 2010. Using the DROID and Apache Tika identification tools, we examined each resource and captured the results as extended MIME types, embedding version, software and hardware identifiers alongside the format information. The combined results form a detailed temporal format profile of the corpus, which we have made available as open data. We present the results of our initial analysis of this dataset. We look at image, HTML and PDF resources in some detail, showing how the usage of different formats, versions and software implementations has changed over time. Further- more, we show that software obsolescence is rare on the web and uncover evidence indicating that network effects act to stabilise formats against obsolescence.

The biblioblogosphere comprises the personal, typically professional-oriented publication of blogs by information and library science practitioners, researchers, and educators. This poster presents preliminary findings from a descriptive study examining bibliobloggers’ attitudes and preferences for digital preservation, and their respective blog publishing behaviors and blog characteristics influencing preservation action. Findings will be compared to those from an earlier study of blogging scholars from the fields of history, economics, law, biology, chemistry and physics. When considering their dual role as publishers contributing to the scholarly record and, in reflection of their professional roles, work relating to stewardship of this record, bibliobloggers present an exceptional case to extend and better understand the phenomenon of blogging in academe and implications for long-term stewardship of this form.

We describe algorithms for automated quality assurance on content of audio files in context of preservation actions and access. The algorithms use cross correlation to compare the sound waves. They are used to do overlap analysis in an access scenario, where preserved radio broadcasts are used in research and annotated. They have been applied in a mi- gration scenario, where radio broadcasts are to be migrated for long term preservation. This work was partially supported by the SCAPE Project. The SCAPE project is co-funded by the European Union under FP7 ICT-2009.4.1 (Grant Agreement number 270137).

In this paper, we describe a new collaborative approach to the collection of representation information to ensure long term access to digital content. Representation information is essential for successful rendering of digital content in the future. Manual collection and maintenance of RI has so far proven to be highly resource intensive and is compounded by the massive scale of the challenge, especially for repositories with no format limitations. This solution combats these challenges by drawing upon the wisdom and knowledge of the crowd to identify online sources of representation information, which are then collected, classified, and managed using existing tools. We suggest that nominations can be harvested and preserved by participating established web archives, which themselves could obviously benefit from such extensive collections. This is a low cost, low resource approach to collecting essential representation information of widespread relevance.

In this paper I am discussing the repositioning of traditional conservation concepts of historicity, authenticity and versioning in relation to born digital artworks, upon findings from my research on preservation of computer-based artifacts. Challenges for digital art preservation and previous work in this area are described, followed by an analysis of digital art as a process of components interaction, as performance and in terms of instantiations. The concept of dynamic authenticity is proposed, and it is argued that our approach to digital artworks preservation should be variable and digital object responsive, with a level of variability tolerance to match digital art intrinsic variability and dynamic authenticity.

Digital preservation workflows for image collections involving automatic and semi-automatic image acquisition and processing are prone to reduced quality. We present a method for quality assurance of scanned content based on computer vision. A visual dictionary derived from local image descriptors enables efficient perceptual image fingerprinting in order to compare scanned book pages and detect duplicated pages. A spatial verification step involving descriptor matching provides further robustness of the approach. Results for a digitized book collection of approximately 35.000 pages are presented. Duplicated pages are identified with high reliability and well in accordance with results obtained independently by human visual inspection.

“Digital preservation metadata” is the information that is needed in order to preserve digital objects successfully in the longterm so that they can be deployed in some form in the future. A digital object is not usable without a computing environment in which it can be rendered or executed. Because of this, information that describes the sufficient components of the digital object’s computing environment has to be part of its preservation metadata. Although there are semantic units for recording environment information in PREMIS 2, these have rarely, if ever, been used. Prompted by increasing interest in the description of computing environments, this paper describes on-going efforts within the PREMIS data dictionary’s Editorial Committee to define an improved metadata description for them.

This paper conveys findings from four years of research conducted by the MetaArchive Cooperative, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), and the University of North Texas to investigate and document how academic institutions may best ensure that the electronic theses and dissertations they acquire from students today will be available to future researchers.

Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) aims at ensuring the intelligibility of digital information at any given time in the near or distant future. LTDP has to address changes that inevitably occur in hardware or software, in the organisational or legal environment, as well as in the designated community, i.e. the people that will use the preserved information. A preservation data manages communication from the past while communicating with the future. Information generated in the past is sent into the future by the current preservation data. European Space Agency (ESA) has a crucial and unique role in this mission, because it maintains in its archives long time series of Earth Observation (EO) data. In order to ensure to future generations data use and accessibility of this cultural heritage is needed to define a systematic approach, accompanied by different use cases.

In this paper, we present and address a number of challenges in digital preservation of entire business processes: (1) identifying digital objects a business process depends on (“What to preserve and why?”); (2) identifying significant changes in digital objects (“When to preserve and why?”); (3) determining a re-deployment setting (“What to re-deploy and why?”). After highlighting these challenges, we illustrate some aspects of business processes that are relevant in the context of digital preservation and provide a model to capture their semantics formally. We, then, proceed to present a decision support architecture to address the challenges using the developed model. We, finally, conclude the paper by discussing the applicability of our proposed model and its associated techniques.

Digital preservation of (business) processes is an emerging topic in Digital Preservation research. Information technology driven processes are complex digital objects, living in an broad context of aspects relevant to their preservation. In this poster, we detail the broad environment of one sample process from the domain of E-Science, a genre classification experiment in the domain of Music Information Retrieval. We show the magnitude of aspects involved, on technology as well as organisational, legal and other aspects.

The quest for identifying ‘significant properties’ is a common challenge for the digital preservation community. While the methodological frameworks for selecting these properties provide a good foundation, a continued discussion is necessary for further clarifying and improving the available methods. This paper advances earlier work by building on the existing InSPECT framework and improving its capabilities of working with complex/compound objects like blogs. The modifications enable a more thorough analysis of object structures, accentuate the differences and similarities between the framework’s two streams of analysis (i.e. Object and Stakeholder analysis) and, subsequently, improve the final reformulation of the properties. To demonstrate the applicability of the modified framework, the paper presents a use case of a blog preservation initiative that is informed by stakeholder interviews and evaluation of structural and technological foundations of blogs. It concludes by discussing the limitations of the approach and suggesting directions for future research.

This project explores the world of retrocomputing, a constellation of largely—though not exclusively—non-professional practices involving old computing technology. Retrocomputing includes many activities that can be seen as constituting “preservation,” and in particular digital preservation. At the same time, however, it is often transformative, producing assemblages that “remix” fragments from the past with newer elements or joining historic components that were never previously combined. While such “remix” may seem to undermine preservation, it allows for fragments of computing history to be reintegrated into a living, ongoing practice, contributing to preservation in a broader sense. The seemingly unorganized nature of retrocomputing assemblages also provides space for alternative “situated knowledges” and histories of computing, which can be quite sophisticated. Recognizing such alternative epistemologies in turn paves the way for alternative approaches to preservation. The institutional digital preservation community may have a lot to gain from paying closer attention to retrocomputing. This gain, however, should not just involve looking for ways to make use of the knowledge and labor of retrocomputing enthusiasts. Rather, it is important to recognize the value of their projects on their own terms and ask in what ways institutional efforts can support such projects.

This paper presents an investigation of the best suitable package formats for long term digital preservation. The choice of a package format for preservation is crucial for future access, thus a thorough analysis of choice is important. The investigation presented here covers setting up requirements for package formats used for long term preserved digital material, and using these requirements as the basis for analysing a range of package formats. The result of the concrete investigation is that the WARC format is the package format best suited for the listed requirements. Fulfilling the listed requirements will ensure mitigating a number of risks of information loss. Thus WARC is the best choice for a package format in cases where these same risks are judged most important. Similar analysis will need to be carried out in cases where the requirements differ from the ones described here, e.g. if there are specific forensic or direct access to files.

This short paper describes problems arising in optical character recognition of and information retrieval from historical texts in languages with rich morphology, rather discontinuous lexical development and a long history of spelling reforms. In a work-in- progress manner, the problems and proposed linguistic solutions are shown on the example of the current project focused on improving the access to digitized Czech prints from the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

In this paper we describe the interaction of three different systems: DuraCloud, a cloud-based service provider, Chronopolis, a digital preservation network, and the San Diego Computer Center’s cloud service. This interaction is targeted to developing a new storage and preservation service available to a wide range of users

In this poster, we introduce the results of a survey of the training needs in digital preservation conducted by the DigCurV project.

Evaluating digital preservation actions performed on digital objects is essential, both during the planning as well as quality assurance and re-use phases to determine their authenticity. While migration results are usually validated by comparing object properties from before and after the migration, the task is more complex: as any digital object becomes an information object only in a rendering environment, the evaluation has to happen at a rendering level for validating its faithfulness. This is basically identical to the situation of evaluating the performance in an emulation setting. In this paper we show how previous conceptual work is applied to an existing emulator, allowing us to feed automated input to the emulation environment as well as extract properties about the rendering process. We identify various significant key characteristics that help us evaluate deviations in the emulator’s internal timing compared to the original system and how we can find out if the emulation environment works deterministically, an important characteristic that is necessary for successful comparison of renderings. We show the results of rendering different digital objects in the emulator and interpret them for the rendering process, showing weaknesses in the evaluated emulator and provide possible corrections as well as generalized recommendations for developing emulators for digital preservation.

This paper provides a practical example of digital archeology and forensics to recover data from floppy disks originally used by CTOS, now an obsolete computer operating system. The various floppy disks were created during the period between the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s containing different types of text, data and binary files. This paper presents practical steps from two different approaches, the tools and workflows involved which can help archivists and digital preservation practitioners recover data from outdated systems and media. While the floppy disk data recovery was a full success, issues remain in filetype detection and interpretation of non-ASCII data files of unknown or unsupported types.

For successful preservation operations, a preservation system needs to be capable of monitoring compliance of preservation operations to specifications, alignment of these operations with the organisation’s preservation objectives, and associated risks and opportunities. This requires linking a number of diverse information sources and specifying complex conditions. For example, the content to be preserved needs to be related to specifications of significant properties, to the file formats used to represent that content, to the software environments available to analyse, render and convert it and the technical environments available to the designated user communities that will consume this content. This article analyses aspects of interest in a preservation context that call for automated monitoring and investigates the feasibility of drawing sufficient information from diverse sources together and linking it in a meaningful way. We define a number of preservation triggers that lead to preservation planning activities and present the requirements and a high-level design of a preservation watch system that is currently being developed. We demonstrate the value of such a monitoring approach on a number of scenarios and cases.

The goal of the bwFLA project is the implementation and development of services and technologies to address Baden-Wurttemberg state and higher education institutes’ libraries’ and archives’ challenges in long-term digital object access. The project aims on enabling diverse user groups to pre- pare non-standard artifacts like digital art, scientific applications or GIS data for preservation. The project’s main goal is to build-on ongoing digital preservation research in international and national projects to integrate workflows for emulation-based access strategies.

In the Indian context, when the e-government records are received for archival purpose, it is observed that very often they are produced without proper compliances for long term digital preservation. This paper presents a case study of e-district Mission Mode Project which offers diverse citizen services and produces the e-records such as birth certificates, domicile certificates, marriage certificates, caste certificates, etc in very large volumes. Such born digital e-government records have to be retained and preserved for technological and legal reasons. The Centre of Excellence for Digital Preservation established at C- DAC, Pune, India has carried out the study of e-record production process in the e-district and the need analysis for its digital preservation. The digital preservation best practices are identified, which have to be incorporated in the production process of e- records, so that the final e-records are produced in “preservable” form with full compliance as per the requirements of OAIS.

Researchers across a range of fields have been inspired by the possibilities of data-intensive research. In many cases, however, researchers find themselves unable to take part due to a lack of facilities, insufficient access to data, cultural disincentives, and a range of other impediments. In order to develop a deeper understanding of this, UKOLN, University of Bath and Microsoft Research have been collaborating on developing a Community Capability Model Framework (CCMF) designed to assist institutions, research funding-bodies and researchers to enhance the capability of their communities to perform data-intensive research. This paper explores the rationale for using capability modelling for informing the development of data-intensive research and outlines the main capability factors underlying the current version of the CCMF.

The majority of existing digital preservation solutions are focusing on the long-term storage of digital content such as documents, images, video, audio files and other domain specific data. Preservation of an Information Technology infrastructure for supporting business processes is a much more challenging task. It requires the preservation of software and hardware stacks as well as relevant contexts, which together, provide an execution layer for running business processes. The proposed TIMBUS architecture addresses limitations of existing digital preservation solutions and provides a complete framework for preserving business processes implemented upon a service oriented architecture.

This paper aims to propose an ontology for the main digital preservation workflows carried out by an organization or an archival system. The proposed ontology covers the entire preservation life cycle, starting from the ingestion of digital resources and including internal functions, such as system administration and preservation planning policies, and access control. Fifty workflow models have been represented using the ontology, which takes into account the special characteristics and features specified by the international standards, as well as the existing metadata schemas for preservation. The proposed ontology supports the decision making of the collection managers, who design preservation policies and follow practices, by providing a knowledge-based tool able to guide, encode and (re)use their reasoning and choices.

Data publishing using semantic web and linked data techniques enables the sharing of detailed information. Importantly this information is shared using common standards and vocabularies to enable simple re-use. In the digital preservation community, an increasing number of systems are adopting linked data techniques for sharing data, including the PRONOM and UDFR technical registries. In many systems, only current information is being shared. Further, this information is not being described with data relating to who and when it was published. Such basic metadata is seen as essential in all digital preservation systems, how- ever has been overlooked to a large extent when publishing linked data. This failing is partly due to there being very few specifications, reference implementations and verification systems in place to aid with publishing this type of linked data. This publication introduces the Linked Data Simple Storage Specification, a solution that enables careful curation linked data by following a series of current best practise guidelines. Through construction of a reference implementation, this work introduces how historical information can be referenced and discovered in order to build customisable alerting services for risk management in preservation systems.

The main digital preservation strategies are based on metadata and in many cases SemanticWeb languages, like RDF/S, are used for expressing them. However RDF/S schemas or ontologies are not static, but evolve. This evolution usually happens independently of the “metadata” (ontological instance descriptions) which are stored in the various Metadata Repositories (MRs) or Knowledge Bases (KBs). Nevertheless, it is a common practice for a MR/KB to periodically update its ontologies to their latest versions by “migrating” the available instance descriptions to the latest ontology versions. Such migrations incur gaps regarding the specificity of the migrated metadata, i.e. inability to distinguish those descriptions that should be reexamined (for possible specialization as consequence of the migration) from those for which no reexamination is justified. Consequently, there is a need for principles, techniques, and tools for managing the uncertainty incurred by such migrations, specifically techniques for (a) identifying automatically the descriptions that are candidate for specialization, (b) computing, ranking and recommending possible specializations, and (c) flexible interactive techniques for updating the available descriptions (and their candidate specializations), after the user (curator of the repository) accepts/rejects such recommendations. This problem is especially important for curated knowledge bases which have increased quality requirements (as in e-Science). In this paper we elaborate on this problem, we propose a general approach, and discuss examples and a prototype application that we have developed assuming the RFD/S framework.

In this paper, we introduce the effort in National Library of China in recent years, including resources accumulation, software development and works in Promotion Project in China. We have developed a platform for Chinese web archiving. And we are building some sites to propagate our works to the nation. At last we figure out some questions about the web archiving in China.

In this paper, we describe the work of the EC-funded DigCurV project. We examine the context of the project, the methods and findings of its extensive survey work, and the development of proposed frameworks for evaluating and delivering a digital curation curriculum.

Digital preservation is increasingly recognized as a need by organizations from diverse areas that have to manage information over time and make use of information systems for supporting the business. Methods for assessment of digital preservation compliance inside an organization have been introduced, such as the Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria and Checklist. However, these methods are oriented towards repository-based scenarios and are not geared at assessing the real digital preservation capabilities of organizations whose information management processes are not compatible with the usage of a repository-based solution. In this paper we propose a checklist assessment method for digital preservation derived from a capability-based reference architecture for digital preservation. Based on the detailed description of digital preservation capabilities provided in the reference architecture, it becomes possible to assess concrete scenarios for the existence of capabilities using a checklist. We discuss the application of the method in two institutional scenarios dealing with the preservation of e-Science data, where clear gaps where identified concerning the logical preservation of data. The checklist assessment method proved to be a valuable tool for raising awareness of the digital preservation issues in those organizations.

By working collaboratively with Ex Libris and utilizing advanced tape drives plus the sophisticated data integrity features of StorageGRID, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been able to advance the state of the art of data integrity and long term preservation in a rapidly growing digital preservation archive.

An increasing number of UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are developing Research Data Management (RDM) support services. Their action reflects a changing technical, social and political environment, guided by principles set out in the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Common Principles on Data Policy. These reiterate expectations that publicly-funded research should be openly accessible, requiring that research data are effectively managed. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) policy framework is particularly significant, as it sets a timeframe for institutions to develop and implement a roadmap for research data management. The UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is responding to such changes by supporting universities to develop their capacity and capability for research data management. This paper describes an ‘institutional engagement’ programme, identifying our approach, and providing examples of work undertaken with UK universities to develop and implement RDM services. We are working with twenty-one HEIs over an eighteen month period, across a range of institution types, with a balance in research strengths and geographic spread. The support provided varies based on needs, but may include advocacy and awareness raising, defining user requirements, policy development, piloting tools and training. Through this programme we will develop a service model for institutional support and a transferable RDM toolkit.

In this paper, we propose an Interoperability Framework (IF) for Persistent Identifiers (PI) systems that addresses functions, roles and responsibilities needed to make heterogeneous PI systems interoperable. The fundamental steps, which provided the main inputs for the design of the model have been: 1) a survey on the use of PI among different stakeholder communities and 2) the definition of interoperability use cases and requirements. The IF is presented as a solution addressing the PI interoperability issues, which have been identified in the survey and have been translated into concrete use cases to serve as requirements for designing the model. Conclusions and intended future work close the paper.

This paper describes the work of the Opportunities for Data Exchange (ODE) project, a project funded by the European Commission under Framework Programme 7. This project investigates issues surrounding data preservation, reuse and exchange from both sociological and technical view points. Led by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the project has sought out stories of success and honorable failures. It has also brought together representatives of key stakeholder in the data preservation and sharing landscape. This has enabled dialogue between these stakeholder in order to identify opportunities for researchers, publishers and libraries to play their part in data exchange. The growing need for research data preservation and curation services, the linking of data to publications, and increasing awareness of the potential of data sharing for innovation, presents a major opportunity for libraries to redefine their roles and embed themselves in the research process. In November 2011 ODE surveyed the 420 plus LIBER member libraries to establish what demand from researchers libraries are experiencing for support in data exchange, what roles they need to fulfill, and what new skills they need to develop and how. The results clearly emphasised the importance of the development of the role of the library in digital curation.

In the beginning, SPAR, the National Library of France's repository, was designed as the OAIS softwarified. It was intended to be a "full OAIS", covering all preservation needs in one tidy system. Then as its potential revealed itself across the library, high hopes arose for a do-it-all digital curation tool. Yet in day to day preservation activities of the BnF, it turns out that SPAR's growth takes a practical approach to the essentials of preservation and the specific needs of communities. Renewed dialogue with producers and users has led to the addition of functions the digital preservation team would not have thought of. This is very clear in what has been created to ingest the BnF's web archives into SPAR, giving the community more information on their data, and in what is taking shape to deal with the BnF's administrative archives, adding new functionalities to the system.The difference between what preservations tools and what curation tools should be at the BnF will have to be examined over time, to ensure all the communities' needs are met while SPAR remains viable.

Cloud and data-intensive computing technologies have introduced novel methods to develop virtualized and scalable applications. The SCAPE Preservation Platform is an environment that leverages cloud computing in order to overcome scalability limitations in the context of digital preservation. In this paper, we provide an overview of the platform architecture and its system requirements. Furthermore, we present a flexible deployment model that can be used to dynamically reconfigure the system and provide initial insights on employing an open-source cloud platform for its realization.

A quite general view of the digital preservation problem and its associated tasks (e.g. intelligibility and task-performability checking, risk detection, identification of missing resources for performing a task) is to approach it from a dependency management point of view. In this paper we extend past rule-based approaches for dependency management for modeling also converters and emulators and we demonstrate how this modeling allows performing the desired reasoning and thus enables offering more advanced digital preservation services. Specifically these services can greatly reduce the human effort required for periodically checking (monitoring) whether a task on a digital object is performable.

In this paper, we describe research led by Educopia Institute regarding the preservation needs for digitized and born-digital newspapers. The Chronicles in Preservation project, builds upon previous efforts (e.g. the U.S. National Digital Newspaper Program) to look more broadly at the needs of digital newspapers in all of their diverse and challenging forms. This paper conveys the findings of the first research phase, including substantive survey results regarding digital newspaper curation practices.

Digital preservation research has increasingly been shifting focus from the preservation of data and static objects to investigate the preservation of complete processes and workflows. Capturing all aspects of a process to be preserved, however, is an extensive and difficult undertaking, as it requires capturing complete software setups with potentially complex setups. Further, the process might use external services that are not easy to capture and monitor. In this paper, we therefore investigate the applicability and usability of using Workflow Management Systems for executing processes in a standard environment where the state of the process can be closely monitored. To this end, we compare three popular workflow management systems. We use a scenario from eScience, implementing a data analysis process, to evaluate the challenges and implications for establishing sustainable and verifiable eScience processes.

In a recent scoping study we have inquired into the data management needs of several research groups at the Uni- versity of Porto and concluded that data quality and ease of on-line data manipulation are among the most valued features of a data repository. This paper describes the en- suing approach to data curation, designed to streamline the data depositing process and built on two components: a curation workflow and a data repository. The workflow in- volves a data curator who will assist researchers in provid- ing meaningful descriptions for their data, while a DSpace repository was customised to satisfy common data deposit and exploration requirements. Storing the datasets as XML documents, the repository allows curators to deposit new datasets using Excel spreadsheets as an intermediate for- mat, allowing the data to be queried on-line and the results retrieved in the same format. This dedicated repository pro- vides the grounds for collecting researcher feedback on the curation process.

Companies face challenges towards designing and implementing a preservation system to store the increasing amounts of digital data they produce and collect. The financial sector, in particular the investment business, is characterized by constantly increasing volumes of high frequency market and transaction data which need to be kept for long periods of time (e.g., due to regulatory compliance). Designing and developing a system ensuring long term preservation of digital data for this sector is a complex and difficult process. The work presented in this article has two main objectives: (1) to exhibit preservation challenges for the financial sector/ investment business, and (2) to present and discuss preliminary results of the requirements elicitation process, with focus on the financial sector - work pursued towards the design and development of a preservation system, within the scope of the on-going R&D FP7 project ENSURE – Enabling kNowledge Sustainability Usability and Recovery for Economic value (http://ensure-fp7.eu). Requirements, use cases and scenarios identified for the financial sector are presented and discussed. The agenda for future research work is also presented.

The effective preservation of both current and historical scientific data will underpin a multitude of ecological, economic and political decisions that shape the future of our society. The SCIDIP-ES project addresses the long-term preservation of the knowledge encoded in scientific data by providing preservation e- infrastructure services which support the persistent storage, access and management needs. Using exemplars from the Earth Science domain we highlight the key preservation challenges and barriers to be overcome by the SCIDIP-ES infrastructure. SCIDIP-ES augments existing science data e-infrastructures by adding specific services and toolkits which implement core preservation concepts, thus guaranteeing the long-term access and exploitation of data assets across and beyond their designated communities.

From October 1‐5, 2012, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information was pleased to host the ninth annual iPRES Conference. The conference hosted three keynote presentations: Steve Knight of the National Library of New Zealand gave a paper on “Implementing Guidelines for Preservation of Digital Heritage”; Kevin Ashley, Director of the UK’s Digital Curation Centre on “Good Research, Good Data, Good Value: the Digital Curation Centre and the Changing Curation Landscape”; and Yunhyong Kim of blogforever, whose paper was entitled “Digital Preservation: A Game of Prediction”. Technical sessions at the conference were on central preservation topics like Preservation Assessment, Training, Preserving Text Objects, Site Reports, Business Processes, Preservation Environments, Models, Concepts, and Community Approaches.

PDF/A is a version of Portable Document Format backed by ISO standard that is designed for archiving and preservation of electronic documents. Many electronic documents exist in PDF format. Due to its popularity, the ability to convert an existing PDF into a conforming PDF/A file is as important, if not more, as being able to produce documents in PDF/A format in digital preservation. In recognition of this fact and encouraged by growing interest from its affiliates, the Florida Digital Archive (FDA) conducted an evaluation of several of the PDF to PDF/A converter applications, the result of which is reported in this paper. There is room for interpretation in the ISO standards concerning PDF/A, which can be manifest in the development of software. In selecting a PDF to PDF/A converter product, reliability of the outcome in terms of PDF/A compliance must be established along with functionality. The goal of this paper is not to rank or promote the software evaluated, but rather to document the FDA’s evaluation process and present the results in such a way that they provide insight into challenges and potential drawbacks during similar evaluation or implementation.

This paper presents an approach for semi-automatic aggregation of knowledge on computer file formats used to support planning for long term preservation. Our goal is to create a solid knowledge base from linked open data repositories which represents the fundament of the DiPRec recommender system. The ontology mapping approach is employed for collecting the information and integrating it in a common domain model. Furthermore, we employ expert rules for inferring explicit knowledge on the nature and preservation friendliness of the file formats.

Managing authenticity is a crucial issue in the preservation of digital medical records, because of their legal value and of their relevance to the Scientific Community as experimental data. In order to assess the authenticity and the provenance of the records, one must be able to trace back, along the whole extent of their lifecycle since their creation, all the relevant events and transformations they have undergone and that may have affected their authenticity and provenance and collect the Preservation Description Information (PDI) as categorized by OAIS. This paper presents a model and a set of operational guidelines to collect and manage the authenticity evidence to properly document these transformations, that have been developed within the APARSEN project, a EU funded NoE, as an implementation of the InterPARES conceptual framework and of the CASPAR methodology. Moreover we discuss the implementation of the guidelines in a medical environment, the health care preservation repository in Vicenza Italy, where digital resources have a quite complex lifecycle including several changes of custody, aggregations and format migrations. The case study has proved the robustness of the methodology, which stands as a concrete proposal for a systematic and operational way to deal with the problem of authenticity management in complex environments. Work partially supported by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) program of the 7th FP for RTD - project APARSEN, ref. 269977.

Increasing experience in developing and maintaining large repositories of digital objects suggests that changes in the large- scale infrastructure of archives, their capabilities, and their communities of use, will themselves necessitate the ability to manage, manipulate, move, and migrate content at very large scales. Migration at scale of digital assets, whether those assets are deposited with the archive, or are created as preservation system artifacts by the archive, and whether migration is employed as a strategy for managing the risk of format obsolescence, for repository management, or for other reasons, is a challenge facing many large-scale digital archives and repositories. This paper explores the experience of Portico (www.portico.org), a not-for-profit digital preservation service providing a permanent archive of electronic journals, books, and other scholarly content, as it undertook a migration of the XML files that document the descriptive, technical, events, and structural metadata for approximately 15 million e-journal articles in its archive. It describes the purpose, planning, technical challenges, and quality assurance demands associated with digital object migration at very large scales.

Digital curation may be thought of as a set of strategies, technological approaches, and activities for establishing and developing trusted repositories, and ensuring long-term access to digital assets. It spans many disciplines and communities, as well as individuals seeking to maintain, preserve and add value to the ever-expanding body of digital content. This diversity has given way to ambiguity in defining digital curation, particularly in consideration of potentially synonymous terms, such as digital stewardship, preservation, and archiving. This poster will provide a forum for participants to challenge and engage in the dialogue that defines and describes digital curation.

Preserved digital data is often of limited use and value, due to the unavailability of the environment where the data has been generated, executed, analysed, and presented. The preservation of complete processes, including the supporting infrastructure, raises a number of new challenges. In highly computerized firms, processes are often based on service oriented architectures with services provided by third parties. Digital preservation of business processes requires keeping the data, software services and infrastructure available for long time spans. The strong intra- and interdependencies of components make modification and adoption for preservation highly complex. Besides the technical challenges, the organisation and legal aspects of a process need to be considered as well. Contracts for external services, licences for software, access rights to business data and national data regulations for sensible data have to be taken into account when preserving complex information systems. The TIMBUS project targets the research and development of methods and tools for preserving business processes over time. This poster presents a phased phases approach and the processes to capture and identify the relevant context, plan preservation actions and execute and store business process for the future.