A number of approaches have been proposed for the problem of digital preservation, and the number of tools offering solutions is steadily increasing. However, the decision making procedures are still largely ad-hoc actions. Especially, the process of selecting the most suitable preservation action tool as one of the key issues in preservation planning has not been sufficiently standardised in practice. The Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) model and corresponding criteria catalogues for trustworthy repositories specify requirements that such a process should fulfill, but do not provide concrete guidance. This article describes a systematic approach for evaluating potential alternatives for preservation actions and building thoroughly defined, accountable preservation plans for keeping digital content alive over time. In this approach, preservation planners empirically evaluate potential action components in a controlled environment and select the most suitable one with respect to the particular requirements of a given setting. The method follows a variation of utility analysis to support multi-criteria decision making procedures in digital preservation planning. The selection procedure leads to well-documented, well-argued and transparent decisions that can be reproduced and revisited at a later point of time. We describe the context and foundation of the approach, discuss the definition of a preservation plan and describe the components that we consider necessary to constitute a solid and complete preservation plan. We then describe a repeatable workflow for accountable decision making in preservation planning. We analyse and discuss experiences in applying this workflow in case studies. We further set the approach in relation to the OAIS model and show how it supports criteria for trustworthy repositories. Finally, we present a planning tool supporting the workflow and point out directions for future research.

www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp The fast changes of technologies in today’s information landscape have considerably shortened the lifespan of digital objects. Digital preservation has become a pressing challenge. Different strategies such as migration and emulation have been proposed; however, the decision for a specific tool e.g. for format migration or an emulator is very complex. The process of evaluating potential solutions against specific requirements and building a plan for preserving a given set of objects is called preservation planning. So far, it is a mainly manual, sometimes ad-hoc process with little or no tool support. This paper presents a service-oriented architecture and decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning process and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.

Abstract. Digital preservation has turned into an active field of research. The most prominent approaches today are migration and emulation; especially considering migration, a range of working tools is available, each with specific strengths and weaknesses. The decision process on which actions to take to preserve a given set of digital objects for future access, i.e., preservation planning, is usually an ad-hoc procedure with little tool support and even less support for automation. This paper presents the integration of tools and services for object migration and characterization through a service oriented architecture into a planning tool called Plato, thus creating a distributed and highly automated preservation planning environment. 1

www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp 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.

Heritage institutions all over the world started on harvesting and preserving resources of the World Wide Web for future generations as part of our culture heritage. This task tends to be a non-trivial one because of two complex challenges: (1) crawling the enormous data amount located in the Internet and (2) performing long term preservation strategies on these data. Nowadays a lot of effort is made in the development of Web crawlers and there exist many years ’ experience with bit storage of large data amounts. However the support for the logical preservation of Internet archives is very limited. The continuous development of technologies that are used in the Web and especially the rapid change in using a tremendous variety of different file formats put the digital assets in the Web archives at risk of becoming inaccessible and unusable in the near future. This paper presents a workflow to apply digital preservation strategies on the content of WARC archives. The migration of the objects within a WARC archive allows accessing and using the information in the future. The new WARC format that is widely used to store Internet crawl results supports migration of its content. Moreover a set of tools is presented that supports the extraction, migration and injection of objects in WARC files.

Abstract. Preserving digital data is becoming a more important issue with the growing amount of data that only exists in digital form. But not only static documents that can have representations in paper or analog tape have to be kept accessible, also interactive forms of data have to be preserved. Interactive fiction, also known as video games, and digital art are just two forms of interactive content that have to be kept alive for historic reasons. Business and scientific applications have to be preserved as well to have data in databases or in documents which can’t be altered for authenticity reasons accessible over a long term. But also documents can contain input fields and interaction ranging from simple formulas to full-fledged interactive 3D-animations and beyond. Emulation is one of the strategies to keep applications for old hardware usable on modern systems. As it is not the only strategy to deal with the digital preservation of complex content, we have to be able to evaluate the different preservation strategies. This paper identifies significant properties of the different types of interactive objects that are analyzed in order to determine optimal preservation solutions. Then various migration and emulation strategies for preserving complex objects over a long term are shown. We discuss methods to automatically test alternatives also by utilizing characterization languages. Then we outline what further steps have to be taken to verify the significant properties and define features that have to be extractable from environments to support automatic testing. 1

Abstract. The lack of QoS attributes and their values is still one of the fundamental drawbacks of web service technology. Most approaches for modelling and monitoring QoS and web service performance focus either on client-side measurement and feedback of QoS attributes, or on ranking and discovery, developing extensions of the standard web service discovery models. However, in many cases, provider-side measurement can be of great additional value to aid the evaluation and selection of services and underlying implementations. We present a generic architecture and reference implementation for non-invasive provider-side instrumentation of data-processing tools exposed as QoS-aware web services, where real-time quality information is obtained through an extensible monitoring framework. In this architecture, dynamically configurable execution engines measure QoS attributes and instrument the corresponding web services on the provider side. We demonstrate the application of this framework to the task of performance monitoring of a variety of applications on different platforms, thus enriching the services with real-time QoS information, which is accumulated in an experience base. 1

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The rapid ongoing changes in software and hardware put digital information at risk. The challenge is to keep electronic data accessible, viewable, and usable for the future when the original software to interpret them has become unavailable. Digital preservation has thus turned into on of the most pressing challenges not only within the digital library community, but also in other areas such as archives and data centres. This chapter introduces the concepts and challenges in the field of digital preservation including the OAIS reference model. We give an overview about the projects and initiatives worldwide dealing with this challenge. We furthermore present preservation planning as a key concept at the heart of preservation endeavours in detail.