Information Management: How a Solid Preservation Plan Can Cure Insomnia #saa11

By Mimi Dionne (@cawprhyd) Aug 29, 2011

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) Annual Meeting continued the second day with a focus on interdisciplinary teams and long-term preservation planning.

The chairperson and panelist included:

Chairperson Paul Jordan, International Monetary Fund
Hannes Kulovitz, Austrian National Archives and Vienna Institute of Technology

Hannes Kulovitz, Austrian National Archives and Vienna Institute of Technology

Mr. Kulovitz’s presentation, Lessons Learned in Preservation Planning, introduced the supporting reasons for a preservation plan, thePlanets’ long-term preservation planning tool Plato, and the components of a preservation plan.

According to Kulovitz, organizations should invest in long-term preservation because the quality of actions fluctuates across different tools; the properties of digital objects are always different; requirements vary across different users and usage scenarios; and organizational preferences, costs, risk tolerances and technical constraints are different for every organization and technical environment.

A preservation plan defines a series of preservation actions to be taken by a responsible institution due to an identified risk for a given set of digital objects or records. To ensure digital content remains accessible to and authentic for future users, a plan must be created that takes into account legal and technical constraints such as storage space, infrastructure and delivery, copyright issues, costs, user needs and object characteristics. The preservation plan includes:

the preservation policies,
legal obligations,
organizational and technical constraints,
user requirements and preservation goals,
describes the preservation context,
the evaluated preservation strategies and,
the resulting decision for one strategy.

Provided that the actions and their deployment, as well as the technical environment, allow it, this action plan is an executable workflow.

Kulovitz emphasized the need for practical implementations designed by an interdisciplinary team.

Although he listed plans for digital preservation of video console games, interactive multimedia art, electronic theses dissertations and bitstream preservation of digital photographs, in this session he cited three preservation planning case studies in scanned images. An excellent technical report on the three cases can be found here. Pay particular attention to the requirements trees.

First Case Study

In partnership with the British Library, 2 million images in TIFF-5 format with a size of about 40MB per image (80 TB of storage) were scanned from old newspaper pages. The project framework included transfer of data to a new carrier, valuation of adequacy of current methods and high-level requirements. The requirements of the newspaper collection resembled other scanning projects you’ve heard: lossless compression only (lossy not allowed); the target format was standardized, and storage costs were reduced. Although several destination formats were suggested and weighed, the successful format was JPEG 2000 lossless compression using ImageMagick.

Second Case Study

In cooperation with the Bavarian State Library, the task was to preserve a collection of digitized 16th century printings and to analyze the benefits and drawbacks of migration from TIFF6 to JPEG2000 with currently available tools. The books held 21,000 prints (about 3 million pages). All pages were stored in TIFF-6 and totaled 72 TB. A comprehensive requirements elicitation workshop resulted in an objective tree that addressed multiple questions (ubiquity, OCR-possible, stability, creation of pdf possible, standardization, licensing, retain filename, open source, duration, log output, image size identical, additional metadata, etc.). Of special note to this project: JPEG 2000 has challenges with color and costs. The Bavarian State Library pays to retrieve and reingest files, but not store, so migration had significant costs attached to it. The Library decided to keep the images in their original format.