Steve Hitchcock, David Tarrant and Leslie Carr School of Electronics & Computer Science

Transforming repositories: from repository managers to institutional data managers

ECA 2010, 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving, Geneva,28 - 30 April 2010

Steve Hitchcock, David Tarrant and Leslie CarrSchool of Electronics & Computer Science

Steve Hitchcock <sh94r AT ecs.soton.ac.uk>

Not everyone can be a digital archiving specialist

Growth of Open Access Digital Repositories

Generated from Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)

http://roar.eprints.org/

Generated from Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)http://www.opendoar.org/

Both charts generated 23 April 2010

ROAR repository format profile

To access a format profile:Find chosen repository in ROAR, open [Record Details]

Format profiles not available for all repositories in ROARROAR disclaimer: Full-text formats is based on automatic file-format identification and is prone to errors

This profile for Australian Research Online repository

From Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)http://roar.eprints.org/

Digital repositories diversifying: institution-wide outputs

Science Teaching

Research Arts

KeepIt exemplar preservation repositories

Digital Preservation Tools for Repository ManagersA practical course in five parts

presented by the KeepIt project in association with

Module 1, Organisational issues, audit, selection and appraisalSchool of ECS, University of Southampton, 19 January 2010

Twitter hashtag #dprc (digital preservation repository course)

Module 1, Organisational issues, audit, selection and appraisalSchool of ECS, University of Southampton, 19 January 2010

Module 3, Primer on preservation workflow, formats and characterisationWestminster-Kingsway College, London, 2 March 2010

Module 2, institutional and lifecycle preservation costs School of ECS, University of Southampton, 5 February 2010

Module 4, Putting storage, format management and preservation planning in the repository

University of Southampton, 18-19 March 2010

Module 5, Trust, of the repository, of the tools and services it chooses University of Northampton, 30 March 2010

Course structure• Module 1. Organisational issues Scoping, selection, assessment,

institutional parameters (19 January 2010)• Module 2. Costs Lifecycle costs for managing digital objects, based

on the LIFE approach, and institutional costs (5 February)• Module 3. Description Describing content for preservation:

provenance, significant properties and preservation metadata (2 March)

• Module 4. Preservation workflow tools available in EPrints for format management, risk assessment and storage, and linked to the Plato planning tool from Planets (17-18 March)

• Module 5. Trust (by others) of the repository’s approach to preservation; trust (by the repository) of the tools and services it chooses (30th March)

KeepIt course participant numbersjisckeepit KeepIt course 3: thanks as well to all participants: 16 for course 1 (from 11 institutions), 15 (from 11) yesterday. Great commitment 03 Mar 2010

jisckeepit KeepIt course: "did you really think it would only be you left by the last module". Yes, but I was wrong. Course 1, 16; course 5, 16 31 Mar 2010

Source: Twitter @jisckeepit

Evaluation: course structure

“Structure and development through the course was excellent. Presentations and practicals gave good introductions to all the tools. Applicability sometimes focussed too much on IRs and research data”

Course evaluation summary

“Many of these tools are, of necessity, complex in scope and time consuming. The challenge is to understand which one to use in which situation and

to what depth to engage with it.”

Tools module 1

• The Data Asset Framework (DAF), Sarah Jones, University of Glasgow, and Harry Gibbs, University of Southampton

• The AIDA toolkit: Assessing Institutional Digital Assets, Ed Pinsent, University of London Computer Centre

Evaluation module 1

Tools module 2

• Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS), Costs, Policy, and Benefits in Long-term Digital Preservation, Neil Beagrie, Charles Beagrie Ltd consultancy

• LIFE3: Predicting Long Term Preservation Costs, Brian Hole, The British Library

Evaluation module 2

“Impressed with LIFE3 tool. I hope it is further developed. I like the way it works and can provide, comparatively quickly, some indication of likely costs.

Useful and practical”

Tools module 3

• Significant characteristics, Stephen Grace and Gareth Knight, Kings College London

• PREMIS, Open Provenance Model

Recipient local-part

Behaviour Structure

Recipient domain-part

Trace-route

Recipient display-name

Sender local-part

Sender domain-part

Sender display-name

Message-id

references

In-reply-to

Body text colour

Body background

strikethrough

underline

Paragraph

Line break

Message text

subject

AnalyseAnalyseCheckCheck ActionAction

• Migration• Emulation• Storage selection

• Format identification,

versioning• File validation

• Virus check• Bit checking and

checksum calculation

Toolse.g. DROID

JHOVEFITS

Preservation planningCharacterisation:Significant properties and technical characteristics, provenance, format, risk factors

Risk analysis

ToolsPlato (Planets)PRONOM (TNA)P2 risk registry (KeepIt)INFORM (U Illinois)KB

Preservation workflow

Tools module 4

• EPrints preservation apps, including the storage controller, Dave Tarrant and Adam Field, University of Southampton

• Plato, preservation planning tool from the Planets project, Andreas Rauber and Hannes Kulovits, TU Wien

Steve Jobs launches Apple iPad

Picture by curiouslee http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiouslee/4320074421/

“75 million people already own iPod Touches and iPhones. That's all people who already know how to use the iPad.”

Evaluation module 4

“This part of the course made me appreciate how big the area of preservation is and also the amount of research undertaken in this area.”

Tools module 5

DRAMBORA, Digital Repository Audit Method Based On Risk Assessment, Martin Donnelly, Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh

TRAC, Trusted Repository Audit and Certification: criteria and checklist

Evaluation: DRAMBORA

“We will definitely be investigating DRAMBORA further”

KeepIt course time

KeepIt course summary in tweets• jisckeepit KeepIt course 1, result 1: senior directors at Northampton U. support use of

DAF http://bit.ly/cFcsas Mon, 08 Feb 2010• digitalfay uploaded my first file to the cloud using #eprints next stop: comprehensive

bitstream preservation policies for repository content Thu, 18 Mar 2010• digitalfay very impressed with end-to-end logical preservation process #eprints3.2

(risk audit) to #planetsway (planning) & back again (action) Thu, 18 Mar 2010• jisckeepit KeepIt course 4: practical-make a preservation plan in Plato, upload it to

EPrints and it enacts the plan on your collection. Magic! Mon, 22 Mar 2010 • jisckeepit KeepIt course: There's now a substantial group of repository managers out

there ready and able to apply appropriate preservation tools Wed, 31 Mar 2010• clairemparry: @jisckeepit absolutely - thanks to all the tutors & organisers for a

fantastic course which made all the long train journeys worth it Tue, 06 Apr 2010• jisckeepit KeepIt course 5: revision, evaluation and concluding thoughts - the last

hurrah. Complete course slides now at http://bit.ly/8XMesd Thu, 08 Apr 2010 Selected tweets from Twapperkeeper for #dprc

http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/dprc

Lessons from the KeepIt course• The digital preservation community has produced an

array of tools covering most requirements.• Repository managers have responded positively to

practice with these tools.• Repository managers need to act to shape their

repositories for the next phase of development: expansion; diversification or focus.

• These tools support this process, as well as the technical management of digital preservation.

• Still need to reduce complexity and make tools simpler for non-specialists.

• One approach is to integrate tools into familiar interfaces, such as repositories.

• This is a great story for digital preservation

Credits• KeepIt team at the University of SouthamptonLes Carr, PI, Steve Hitchcock, project manager, David

Tarrant, developer

• KeepIt preservation exemplar repositories are led by: Simon Coles (eCrystals, University of Southampton)Stephanie Meece (University of the Arts London)Debra Morris (EdShare, University of Southampton)Miggie Pickton (Nectar, University of Northampton)

Thanks to all KeepIt course tutors and tutees

KeepIt is funded by JISC (to Sept. 2010) as part of its Information Environment Programme 2009-11http://preservation.eprints.org/keepit/