Towards SIRF: Self-contained Information Retention Format (original) (raw)

Critique of Architectures for Long-Term Digital Preservation

2009

Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs) and Trustworthy Digital Objects (TDOs) seem to be the only generic digital preservation methodologies proposed. Before any preservation method is recommended for wide use, it should be exposed to searching analysis. Evolving technology and fading human memory threaten the long-term intelligibility of many kinds of documents. Furthermore, some records are susceptible to improper alterations that make them untrustworthy. We argue that the TDR approach has shortfalls as a method for long-term digital preservation of sensitive information. For specificity, we discuss a particular implementation. TDO methodology addresses these needs, providing for making digital documents durably intelligible. It uses EDP standards for a few file formats and XML structures for text documents. For other information formats, intelligibility is assured by using a virtual computer. To protect sensitive information-content whose inappropriate alteration might mislead its readers, the integrity and authenticity of each TDO is made testable by embedded public-key cryptographic message digests and signatures. The authenticity of the keys is protected recursively in a social hierarchy grounded by publishing keys of well-known institutions. A TDO is a specific kind of OAIS Archival Information Package convenient for sharing among repositories. The content and metadata of properly constructed TDOs are sufficient for creating the usual kinds of catalog records and search indices during repository ingestion. Comparison of TDR and TDO methodologies suggests differentiating near-term preservation measures from what is needed for the long term. The proper focus for long-term preservation technology is signed packages that each combine a record collection with its metadata and that also bind context-Trustworthy Digital Objects. If all that stuff was worth creating, surely some of it is worth saving! © 2009, H.M. Gladney G:\W\DL\DigPres\Crit\TDR&TDO.doc more expensive to correct than they are today. This examination should seek opportunities to reduce complexity that might mislead readers. Technology for near-term preservation needs flexibility for software improvements. In contrast, technology for long-term preservation needs to be insensitive to changing technology and infrastructure. It therefore proves helpful to distinguish near-term preservation from long-term preservation. What Is the Challenge? What is the meaning of preservation? Does the meaning change when it is applied to electronic rather than paper-based records? ... Will current strategies for preserving electronic records ensure longevity and authenticity? ... Have effective cost models been developed? 2 The notion of a digital preservation theory 3,4 is recent, being mentioned earlier than 2007 only in comments about shortfalls. What do people expect of a theory to think it useful? To be most helpful for engineering, a theory would exhibit at least the following characteristics. • It would be based on broad fundamental theory that is widely accepted as germane and successful. • It would differentiate its topic from nearby topics, particularly topics that already have good theories.

The need for preservation aware storage

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2007

Digital Preservation deals with ensuring that digital data stored today can be read and interpreted tens or hundreds of years from now. At the heart of any solution to the preservation problem lies a storage component. This paper characterizes the requirements for such a component, defines its desirable properties and presents the need for preservationaware storage systems. Our research is conducted as part of CASPAR, a new European Union (EU) integrated project on the preservation of data for very long periods of time. The position presented was developed while designing the storage foundation for the CASPAR software framework.

Preservation DataStores: Architecture for Preservation Aware Storage

24th IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST 2007), 2007

The volumes of digital information are growing continuously and most of today's information is "born digital". Alongside this trend, business, scientific, artistic and cultural needs require much of this information to be kept for decades, centuries or longer. The convergence of these two trends implies the need for storage systems that support very long term preservation for digital information. We describe Preservation DataStores, a novel storage architecture to support digital preservation. It is a layered architecture that builds upon open standards, along with the OAIS, XAM and OSD standards. This new architecture transforms the logical information-object, a basic concept in preservation systems, into a physical storage object. The transformation allows more robust and optimized implementations for preservation aware storage. The architecture of Preservation DataStores is being developed as an infrastructure component of the CASPAR project * and will be tested in the context of this project using scientific, cultural, and artistic data. * Work partially supported by European Community under the Information Society Technologies (IST) program of the 6th FP for RTD -project CASPAR contract IST-033572. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this paper. It does not represent the opinion of the European Community, and the European Community is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein.

Long Term Preservation of Digital Data—Background Research

2012

The main part of this report describes the outcome of our questionnaire study on LTP systems that was performed during the second half of 2011. The study discusses types of systems deployed in memory institutions and their main features.

Digital Preservation Time Capsule: A Showcase for Digital Preservation

2011

Abstract. The importance of Digital Preservation is increasing steadily. The amount of digital data is growing fast, and maintaining the long term availability and accessibility of these data is turning into an increasing challenge. Creating an operational archival system requires to solve significant challenges in terms of analyzing and monitoring massive volumes of data while applying preservation actions. Still, simply demonstrating and grasping the issues surrounding Digital Preservation is non-trivial. It is very difficult to make digital preservation tangible, which is the main goal of the Digital Preservation Time Capsule. This paper presents the concepts of the Planets Digital Preservation Time Capsule, an appealing showcase demonstrating a range of activities in the context of Digital Preservation. 1

Evolving Domains, Problems and Solutions for Long Term Digital Preservation

We present, compare and contrast new directions in long term digital preservation as covered by the four large European Community funded research projects that started in 2011. The new projects widen the domain of digital preservation from the traditional purview of memory institutions preserving documents to include scenarios such as health-care, data with direct commercial value, and webbased data. Some of these projects consider not only how to preserve the programs needed to interpret the data but also how to manage and preserve the related workflows. Considerations such as risk analysis and cost estimation are built into some of them, and more than one of these efforts is examining the use of cloud-based technologies. All projects look into programmatic solutions, while emphasizing different aspects such as data collection, scalability, reconfigurability, and full lifecycle management. These new directions will make digital preservation applicable to a wider domain of users and will give better tools to assist in the process.

A reference architecture for digital preservation

2010

ABSTRACT Apart from being a technological issue, digital preservation raises several organizational challenges. These challenges are starting to be addressed in the industrial design and e-Science domains, where emerging requirements cannot be addressed directly by OAIS. Thus, new approaches to design and assess digital preservation environments are required.

Archival storage for digital libraries

Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Digital libraries - DL '98, 1998

We propose an architecture for Digital Library Repositories that assures long-term archival storage of digital objects. The architecture is formed by a federation of independent but collaborating sites, each managing a collection of digital objects. The architecture is based on the following key components: use of signatures as object handles, no deletions of digital objects, functional layering of services, the presence of an awareness service in all layers, and use of disposable auxiliary structures. Long-term persistence of digital objects is achieved by creating replicas at several sites.