Shaman: D14.2 - report on demonstration and evaluation activity in the domain of "memory institututions"

Abstract

1. The report describes the demonstration and evaluation of ISP1, which was designed to demonstrate the potential of the SHAMAN framework for digital preservation in the context of memory institutions and for the research and development community.2. The demonstration process was carried out by means of presentations based on screen-casts in three locations, Frankfurt, Vilnius and Glasgow. The audiences for the demonstrations consisted persons occupying of a wide range of roles in memory institutions, including senior management, operational level staff and IT support staff.3. The evaluation is based on the reports of focus groups held in the three locations, together with structured data from self-completed questionnaires, administered on the same occasions.4. Participants in the focus groups responded favourably to the ideas demonstrated in the presentations. There was particular interest in the choice of mainly open source software and in automation of processes, both of which have cost reduction implications, and in the idea of a digital preservation policy: the majority of participating organizations had no such policy. Participants also drew attention to aspects of preservation which they found lacking in the presentation and which were desirable, specifically: the preservation of font information; working with already obsolete formats; the automatic extraction of necessary metadata; the fact of mixed media archives involving, e.g., film and audio files; support for controlled vocabularies for search and discovery; and demonstration of workflows at a more practical level.5. The questionnaire results revealed most approval of the retrieval and verification capabilities and less for the ingest processes. Otherwise the results supported the findings from the focus groups in general. There was a division of opinion over the value of the Multivalent browser and the application of grid technology, possibly because of differences in knowledge of these matters. Highest priority was assigned to data migration, access and authentication and bit stream preservation and least to independence standards and search capacity – issues that may be worth further exploration.6. Evaluation has also been performed to determine the project‟s impact on the R&D community by means of submission and rejection rates of papers to journals and conferences, and bibliometric and Webometric analyses. The results demonstrate that the research outputs from the project are of interest to the R&D community and that the impact of the project as a whole compares favourably with other European projects in the digital preservation area.7. The evaluation has revealed strengths and shortcomings in the demonstration process, which will influence the development of demonstrators for ISP2 and ISP3. The SHAMAN framework for digital preservation is seen as offering new possibilities and rigorous methods for the field by the practitioners in memory institutions.

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