Design and Architecture of a Novel Preservation Watch System

Abstract

Successful preservation of content requires sophisticated mechanisms for collecting, tracking and analyzing information about a multitude of relevant aspects. This is not limited to content itself, but also tracking of available software, other organization's content, usage statistics and trends, format risks, systems operations and many more. Such tracking requires a flexible system that supports evolution over time and provides an extensible platform for scalability. This article presents a novel approach towards automated monitoring of preservation-related information. We discuss the challenges and information sources that need to be covered and outline the key design features of a novel preservation watch system. We discuss how this system addresses critical information needs for informed preservation management and outline next steps ahead.

Digital preservation practices for information resources in university libraries of Pakistan

“…Whereas emulation was the least practiced strategy (5.8%). Similarly, out of 342 organizations surveyed by Faria (2017) in different countries also reported that most of them were backing up their digital materials. Above half (51%) claimed to be monitoring backup failure.…”

“…A number of surveys have been conducted on digital preservation in different parts of the world. The plotting confirms that studies have been conducted covering institutions worldwide (Atkins et al ., 2017; Bergau, 2010; Bergin, 2013; Engelhardt, 2013; Faria, 2017; Hedstrom and Montgomery, 1998; OCLC/RLGPREMIS Working Group, 2004; Sinclair et al. , 2011).…”

Scalable decision support for digital preservation

“…Scout [25] is an automated preservation monitoring service which supports the scalable preservation planning process by collecting and analyzing information on the preservation environment, pulling together information from heterogeneous sources and providing coherent unified access to it. It addresses the need to combine an awareness of the internal state of an organization and its systems (internal monitoring) with an awareness of the environment in the widest sense (external monitoring) to enable a continued assessment of the alignment between the two (Faria et al, 2012).…”

“…Once information is collected, it is saved in a formally specified and normalized manner to the knowledge base (Faria et al, 2012). Built upon linked data principles, the knowledge base supports reasoning on and analysis of the collected data using standard mechanisms such as SPARQL [27].…”

“…The article synthesizes and extends a series of articles reporting on partial solution blocks to this overarching challenge (Becker & Rauber 2011c;Becker, Duretec, et al 2012;Faria et al 2012;Kulovits et al 2013a;Kulovits et al 2013b;Faria et al 2013;Kraxner et al 2013). Besides pulling together the compound vision and value proposition of the integrated systems and providing additional insight into the design goals and objectives, we conduct an extensive evaluation based on a controlled case study, outline the interfaces of the ecosystem to enable integration with arbitrary repository environments, discuss implications for systems integration, and assess the improvement of the provided system over the state of the art in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and trustworthiness.…”