OCLC Research Releases: “Preservation Health Check: Monitoring Threats to Digital Repository Content” (Prelim Findings, Phase 1)

The following report was recently published by OCLC Research.

Title

Preservation Health Check: Monitoring Threats to Digital Repository Content
April 2014

Authors

Wouter Kool
Brian Lavoie
Titia van der Werf

Source

OCLC Research

About the Report

Preservation Health Check: Monitoring Threats to Digital Repository Content presents the preliminary findings of Phase 1 of our Preservation Health Check investigation of preservation monitoring and suggests that there is an opportunity to use PREMIS preservation metadata as an evidence base to support a threat assessment exercise based on the Simple Property-Oriented Threat (SPOT) model.

Key Highlights

• There is a need for digital preservation repositories to perform periodic “health checks” as a routine part of preservation activities

• Preservation Health Check activities serve the day-to-day planning and operations of digital repositories

• A certain level of predictability and harmonization is necessary for threat assessment applications that rely on automated data evaluation

• Analysis reveals a variety of gaps in current preservation metadata coverage, which might be filled by other metadata schema

• Findings suggest an opportunity to use PREMIS preservation metadata as an evidence base to support a threat assessment exercise

• The results of preservation actions (PREMIS Events) represent a crucial part of the information needed for assessment—whether this information is under the direct control of the repository itself, or whether it is created and maintained by parties external to the repository.

• The flexibility of the PREMIS standard allows for a large diversity in implementations and leaves much room for encoding relevant metadata in other formats and schemas—all of which impedes the implementation of a threat assessment logic that generalizes over many repositories.

Next Steps

Phase 2 of our Preservation Health Check Pilot will extend the logic diagrams to other SPOT properties developed in Phase 1 and test them against a data set of “real-world” preservation metadata provided by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Direct to Full Text Report (20 pages; PDF)
April 2014
Additional Info and Background
Learn More About the Preservation Health Check Project
Including materials from a number of presentations dating back to 2012.

Filed under: Data Files, Digital Preservation, News, Open Access, Preservation, Reports