Preservation Planning with Plato

Abstract

Due to the rapid technological changes in today’s information landscape the preservation of digital information has turned into a pressing challenge affecting everybody from large cultural heritage institutions, via industry and small and medium enterprises, to private users wanting to preserve their holiday photos and email communications. Several examples of considerable data loss because of taking the longevity of digital objects for granted have drawn the public’s attention to the problem that digital material does not last forever. Also a comprehensive survey among professional archivists conducted by SNIA’s 100 Year Archive Task Force arrived at the result that ‘Digital information is at risk of being lost’ [15] and underlines the growing awareness of the urgency of digital preservation. The challenge of maintaining the physical readability is just one among multitude other problems one comes along when dealing with this issue. A lot of different strategies, i.e. preservation actions, have been proposed to tackle this challenge. However, which strategy to choose, and subsequently which tools to select to implement it, is a crucial decision which poses significant challenges. The decision must be based on a well-documented and profound analysis of the requirements and performance of the tools taken into consideration. This tutorial will introduce the major challenges that digital preservation activities face. It will then discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the various strategies that exist to tackle these problems. The OAIS reference model, an ISO standard describing the functional model as well as the information model of an archival information system will be presented, before focusing on a specific task in digital preservation, namely planning a sound strategy for preserving one's digital assets. To this end a solid workflow that leads to a profound, well-documented decision that one can be held accountable for, will be discussed. Additionally, we will present Plato, a software tool that is supporting this workflow, automating the core steps in this endeavour. 1

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