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Digital objects require appropriate measures for digital preservation to ensure that they can be accessed and used in the near and far future. While heritage institutions have been addressing the challenges posed by digital preservation needs for some time, private users and SOHOs (Small Office/Home Office) are less prepared to handle these challenges. Yet, both have increasing amounts of data that represent considerable value, be it office documents or family photographs. Backup, common practice of home users, avoids the physical loss of data, but it does not prevent the loss of the ability to render and use the data in the long term. Research and development in the area of digital preservation is driven by memory institutions and large businesses. The available tools, services and models are developed to meet the demands of these professional settings.This paper analyses the requirements and challenges of preservation solutions for private users and SOHOs. Based on the requirements and supported by available tools and services, we are designing and implementing a home archiving system to provide digital preservation solutions specifically for digital holdings in the small office and home environment. It hides the technical complexity of digital preservation challenges and provides simple and automated services based on established best practice examples. The system combines bitstream preservation and logical preservation strategies to avoid loss of data and the ability to access and use them. A first software prototype, called Hoppla, is presented in this paper.

Abstract.With the rapid technological changes, digital preservation, i.e. the endeavor to provide long-term access to digital objects, is turning into one of the most pressing challenges to ensure the survival of our digital artefacts. A set of strategies has been proposed, with a range of tools supporting parts of digital preservation actions. Yet, with requirements on which strategy to follow and which tools to employ being different for each setting, depending e.g. on object characteristics or institutional requirements, deciding which solution to implement has turned into a crucial decision. This paper presents the DELOS Digital Preservation Testbed. It provides an approach to make informed and accountable decisions on which solution to implement in order to preserve digital objects for a given purpose. It is based on Utility Analysis to evaluate the performance of various solutions against well-defined objectives, and facilitates repeatable experiments in a standardized laboratory setting.

TIMBUS is a partially EU-funded research project in the area of digital preservation. The project aims at a holistic view on the preservation of business processes over long-term periods. This view includes the business software as a well as all related context information for re-use at a later point in time. Digital preservation ensures continued access to digital information over time (e.g., 5, 15, 25 or 50 years). The longterm planning horizon of preserving relevant parts of a business processes raises a number of new research challenges for software design, development and maintenance.Current service-oriented systems are using distributed services from different providers located at different geographical locations. Workflows and business processes are volatile in terms of services disappearing and fundamental changes in technology. TIMBUS researches on methods, processes and tools to ensure continued access to information based on preserving relevant data and their context (e.g., services, software and the data's meaning). The project aims at identifying, capturing and preserving relevant information and their dependencies necessary to understand the preserved business processes in a remote future.In this paper we describe the primary objectives of the TIMBUS project with special focus on challenges caused by the preservation of software.

An increasing number of institutions throughout the world face legal obligations or business needs to collect and preserve digital objects over several decades. Today, a range of tools exist today to support the variety of preservation strategies such as migration or emulation. Yet, different preservation requirements across institutions and settings make the decision on which solution to implement very difficult.This paper presents the PLANETS Preservation Planning approach. It provides an approved way to make informed and accountable decisions on which solution to implement in order to optimally preserve digital objects for a given purpose. It is based on Utility Analysis to evaluate the performance of various solutions against well-defined requirements and goals. The viability of this approach is shown in several case studies for different settings. We present its application to two scenarios of web archives, two collections of electronic publications, and a collection of multimedia art. This work focuses on the different requirements and goals in the various preservation settings.