IT Research Challenges in
Digital Preservation
Andreas Rauber
Department of Software Technology and
Interactive Systems
Vienna University of Technology
http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~andi
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Overview
 Why do we need Digital Preservation?
 Digital Preservation Projects in Europe
 IT-oriented Challenges in Digital Preservation
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
 Conclusions
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Why do we need Digital Preservation?
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Why do we need Digital Preservation?
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Why do we need Digital Preservation?
 Digital Objects require specific environment to be
accessible :
- Files need specific programs
- Programs need specific operating systems (-versions)
- Operating systems need specific hardware components
 SW/HW environment is not stable:
-
Files cannot be opened anymore
Embedded objects are no longer accessible/linked
Programs won‘t run
Information in digital form is lost
(usually total loss, no degradation)
 Digital Preservation aims at maintaining digital objects
authentically usable and accessible for long time
periods.
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Strategies for Digital Preservation
Strategies
(grouped according to Companion Document to UNESCO Charter
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001300/130071e.pdf)
 Investment strategies:
- Standardization, Data extraction, Encapsulation, Format limitations
 Short-term approaches:
- Museum, Backwards-compatibility, Version-migration, Reengineering
 Medium- / long-term approaches:
- Migration, Viewer, Emulation
 Alternative approaches:
- Non-digital Approaches, Data-Archeology
 No single optimal solution for all objects
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Migration
 Transformation into different format, continuous or
on-demand (Viewer)
+ Wide-spread adoption
+ Possibility to compare to un-migrated object
+ Immediately accessible
- Unintended changes, specifically over sequence of
migrations
- Cannot be used for all objects
- Requires continuous action to migrate
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Emulation
 Emulation of hardware or software
(operating system, applications)
+ Concept of emulation widely used
+ Numerous emulators are available
+ Potentially complete preservation of functionality
+ Object is rendered identically
- Object is rendered identically
- Requires detailed documentation of system
- Requires knowledge on how to operate current systems in
the future
- Complex technology
- Emulators must be emulated or migrated themselves
- Emulators potentially erroneous/incomplete
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Digital Preservation
 Affects all domains
-
Cultural heritage
eGovernment
Primary data: Sensor data, experiment data
Industry: production processes, workflows, monitoring
Medical, Insurance/Banking,
Society: photos, communications
 Test:
- Trying to repeat / verify “old” experiments
- Problems with
• Data Management: original test data, parameters,
preprocessing,…
• Code: compilability, change of libraries/functionality
• interpretability of results, know-how
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Digital Preservation
 Is a complex task
 Requires a concise understanding of the objects, their
intellectual characteristics, the way they were created and
used and how they will most likely be used in the future
 Requires a continuous commitment to preserve objects to
avoid the „digital dark ages“
 Requires a solid, trusted infrastructure and workflows to
ensure digital objects are not lost
 Is essential to maintain electronic publications, research
data, … accessible
 Will become more complex as digital objects become more
complex
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Overview
 Why do we need Digital Preservation?
 Digital Preservation Projects in Europe
 IT-oriented Challenges in Digital Preservation
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
.................................................
Overview
 Digital Preservation Projects in Europe
large number, small selection provided below
- DPE: Digital Preservation Europe, EU, FP6
- Caspar: Cultural, Artistic and Scientific Knowledge for Preservation,
Access and Retrieval
- Planets: Preservation and Long-term Access Networked Services:
- Shaman: Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent Archiving
- LIWA: Living Web Archives
- Keep-it: Kultur, eCrystals, EdShare (and NECTAR) - Preserve It
 IT-oriented Challenges in Digital Preservation
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
 Conclusions
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DPE
FP6 Coordinating Action
http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu
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What is DPE?
Vision
FP6 Coordinating Action,
Digitalpreservationeurope (DPE) intends to create
a coherent platform for proactive cooperation,
collaboration, exchange and dissemination of
research results and experience in the
preservation of digital objects
Digital Preservation: ensuring long-term
accessibility of digital objects
Mitigating the risk of a “digital dark age”
http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu
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Objectives
Two macro objectives:
1. to foster collaboration and synergies among
on-going projects and existing initiatives
across the ERA [repositories and audit and
certification tools]
2. to raise up awareness on digital preservation
challenges among different user
communities [different level of awareness on
the subject and its strategic significance]
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Activities
DPE Activities
•
Range of activities to foster research and take-up in
digital preservation
•
Research Roadmap
•
Digital Preservation Challenge
•
Researcher and Practitioner Exchange
•
DPE Videos
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Research Roadmap
Preservation Research Roadmap
The Roadmap aims at contributing to the planning
of our future R&D in Digital Preservation by
means of different actions:

Analysing the state of the art in Digital Preservation
research and already existing research agendas on
a global level;

Researching the needs and demands from the
point of view of the Digital Preservation user
communities and their leading experts;

Researching the needs and demands of future
markets for technology and service providers
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Research Roadmap
DPE Recommended Research

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Restauration
Conservation
Collection and repository management
Preservation as risk management
Preserving the interpretability and
functionality of digital objects
Collection cohesion and interoperability
Automation in preservation
Preserving the context
Storage technologies
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DP Challenge
DPE Challenge
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Promotion of innovation in DP
Targeted at students
Main Goal:
Provide access to and make digital objects useable
Open to participants world-wide
Submission deadline: May 30 2008
http://www.digitalpreservationeurope.eu/challenge
Different tasks, eg.
• Assessment of Submission by an International
Panel of Experts in the field
• Access Data in a Legacy Client-Server System
• Proprietary File Format
• Preservation of Multimedia Art
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Raising Awareness of DP Issues
DPE Videos



Experts & Practitioners:
Briefing Papers, Seminars
General Public:
little awareness, everybody afected
DPE Videos:
series of short cartoons highlighting DP issues
aimed at non-experts
trying to communicate challenges in simple style
Videos available on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/wepreserve
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CASPAR
http://www.casparpreserves.eu
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CASPAR
 How can digital data still be used and understood in the
future when systems, software, and everyday knowledge
continues to change? This is the CASPAR challenge.
 The CASPAR project is mainly based on the OAIS
standard ISO:14721:2003
 Its Architecture is defined for
- Managing key concepts of the OAIS reference model
- Supporting main functionality identified in the OAIS
functional model
 CASPAR aims to define and implement interfaces and
functionally independent components
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Preservation Issue 1
 Users may be unable to understand or use the data e.g.
the semantics, format, processes or algorithms involved
- How to guarantee digital information may be accessed and
understood in the future?
- How to guarantee retrieval of Archival Information?
- How to guarantee intelligibility of digital information within
heterogeneous Designated Communities?
 Non-maintainability of essential hardware, software or
support environment may make the information
inaccessible
- How to guarantee preservation actors are informed about
change events?
- How to guarantee appropriate actions are undertaken to
preserve Archival Information against change events?
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Preservation Issue 3
 The chain of evidence may be lost and there may be
lack of certainty of provenance or authenticity
- How to guarantee an adequate integrity and identity for any
Archival Information?
 Access and use restrictions may make it difficult to reuse
data, or alternatively may not be respected in future
- How to guarantee an adequate security access with the proper
rights to any resource and functionality within an Archive?
 The current custodian of the data, whether an
organisation or project, may cease to exist at some point
in the future
- How to guarantee a proper information package management
within and Archive?
- How to guarantee long-time preservation maintenance of any
information package?
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Planets
http://www.planets-project.eu
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The Planets project
 4-year research and technology development project
co-funded by the European Union
 Addresses core digital preservation challenges
 Started June 2006 with €15m budget
 Coordinated by the British Library
 16 partners
- national libraries and archives
- leading technology companies
- research universities
 Builds on strong digital archiving and preservation
programmes
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Planets partners
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The British Library
National Library, Netherlands
Austrian National Library
State and University Library,
Denmark
 Royal Library, Denmark
 National Archives, UK
 Swiss Federal Archives
 National Archives, Netherlands
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Planets partners


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Tessella Plc
IBM Netherlands
Microsoft Research
Austrian Research
Centers GmbH
 Hatii at University of
Glasgow
 University of Freiburg
 Vienna University of
Technology
 University of Cologne
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The Planets team
All Staff Meeting, February 2007
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Planets Architecture
Preservation
Planning
Services
Digital
Content
Preservation
Action
Services
Test Bed:
evaluation and
validation
services
Characterisation
Services
Interoperability Framework
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Organisational
Context
External
Context
Technical
Environment
Preservation Action
 Transform content
- Pluggable infrastructure for third-party
migration tools
 Transform environment
- Dioscuri:
Modular emulation of the full hardware/software environment
- Universal Virtual Computer (UVC):
provides a layered durable approach to emulation
 Preservation Action Tools registry
 XML language for describing preservation action tools
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Preservation Characterisation
 Characterisation framework
- Unifies tools for identifying file formats
and extracting object properties
 Characterisation registry
- Based on the file format registry PRONOM
 eXtensible Characterisation
Languages (XCL)
- Family of XML languages
for characterising digital objects
 Comparator verifies effects of preservation actions
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Infrastructure and Testbed
 Interoperability Framework provides
common basis
-
JBoss Application Server
Logging, Security Services
Registry services
User management and Single-Sign-On
 Planets Testbed
- Controlled environment for the execution of experiments
- Accumulated experience base collected in registry
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Preservation planning
 Collection profiling services
 Technology watch services
 Risk assessment of digital objects
 Preservation planning methodology
 Tool support: Plato, the Planning Tool
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Preservation planning
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Evaluating preservation strategies
Variety of solutions and tools exist
Each strategy has unique strengths and weaknesses
Requirements vary across settings
Decision on which solution to adopt is complex
Documentation and accountability is essential
 Preservation planning assists in decision making
 Evaluation of strategies on representative sample content
according to specific requirements
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Securing
Communication
with
the future
Research & Development Project
in Digital Preservation
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SHAMAN Objectives
SHAMAN will establish an Open Distributed Resource
Management Infrastructure Framework enabling Gridbased Resource Integration, that is firmly grounded in a
conceptual and technical reference architecture.
SHAMAN will develop and integrate technologies to
support Contextual and Multivalent Archival and
Preservation Processes to enable proper preservation
management and policies.
SHAMAN will support Managing of Future Requirements by
safeguarding Interoperability with Future Environments
based on evidence gathered through the characterisation of
digital objects, their (metadata) context and their
preservation environment, resulting in the evolution of
preservation policies.
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SHAMAN Outputs
SHAMAN will deliver a next-generation
Digital Preservation framework, with
three prototypical applications.
 scientific publishing in libraries and
documents in governmental archives
 digital objects used in industrial design
and engineering
 data resources used in e-Science
applications
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SHAMAN Framework
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SHAMAN Consortium
SHAMAN Collaborators:
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 FP7 project funded by the European Commission
 Started in Feb 2008
 EA, L3S, Max Planck, Hungarian accademy of science,
Hanzo Archives, libraries and archives
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Users and challenges identified
User type
Main concern
Locker
National Libraries
Size of archives
No control of size and its evolution with
time with implication on costs control.
Other Libraries
Coherence
Selecting and keeping appropriate
content for their user community is
difficult on the web
Institutional Archives
Fidelity
Lack of fidelity to the original
TV and radio Archives Variety of content type
Impossibility to archive streaming
Museums
Variety of content type
Corporate Archives
Fidelity
Difficulty to archive non-standard
formats
Fidelity to the original and temporal
coherence for compliance
Researchers
Fidelity
Difference between original web and
what current WA can deliver
End Users
Interpretability
Impression of getting lost in WA
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Technology concerned
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Approach
Example: Semantic Evolution Detection
 Time-Specific Term Contexts
Leningrad@1970 (Soviet Union, Hermitage, Moscow,
Neva River, Baltic Sea,…)
Saint Petersburg@2009 (Russia, Hermitage, Moscow,
Neva River, Baltic Sea,…)
 Across-Time Semantic Similarity compares term contexts
and shows high similarity between Leningrad@1970 and
Saint Petersburg@2009
 Term Coherence analyzes term contexts and shows that
Saint Petersburg@2009 and Hermitage@2009 are
commonly used together
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Approach
 Good query reformulations contain query terms similar to
the original query terms that are commonly used together
 Examples
Saint Petersburg Museum Leningrad Museum
✔
Leningrad Cowboys Saint Petersburg Cowboys
✖
iPod Hearing Damage Walkman Hearing Damage
✔
disabled / handicapped / special needs
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KeepIt
--------------------------------------
Kultur, eCrystals, EdShare (and NECTAR) –
Preserve It!
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Project Overview
 Aim: To create a number of exemplar preservation
repositories from which others can learn
 Small number of very diverse repositories
Training
Deployment
Development
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47
Preservation
Long Term
Reliable Storage
Risk Analysis
Mitigation / Action
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Long Term Reliable Storage
EPrints is expanding the number places
in which plug-ins can be utilised.
Import Plug-ins
Export Plug-ins
EPrints Core
Interfaces, Submission Manager
Database
Controller
Storage Controller
CLOUD
(Amazon S3)
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Overview
 Why do we need Digital Preservation?
 Digital Preservation Projects in Europe
 IT-oriented Digital Preservation Challenges
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
.................................................
DP Research
 Some provocative (?) observations
 IT R&D frequently suffers from disconnect between
academia and practice
- research independent of development
- theoretical results that cannot be applied to practice
 DP R&D driven strongly by practice
- many good and useful results
- reactive instead of proactive
- results need to be applicable now
- lacks creative prospect into problems of the future
- lacks acceptability for non-perfect solutions
- little real IT research by IT experts
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DP Research
 DP research requires several IT sub-disciplines
 IT research in DP needs to
- build its own research agenda
- live in an open-minded environment allowing
(initially) non-perfect solutions
- be evaluated following stringent standards of
empirical evidence, validation and benchmarking
- needs to be pro-active, foreseeing challenges
of the future
- address a broader scope of topics that go beyond
migration/emulation, metadata and data management
and similar currently dominant issues
 DP an integral issue of all IT systems design
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DP Research
Urgently needed within DP community:
 Identify IT areas that need to contribute to DP research
 For each area, come up with the top-5 research questions
 These research questions should be concrete
- formulated as a research hypothesis
- formulated as a PhD topic
 How can we get these IT-disciplines involved?
 How can we get IT researchers motivated?
- e.g. DPE research challenge
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DP Research
Potential areas:
 Databases:
- split of data and function and its description
- PP-aware design and description
- modeling data semantics for DP
 IT security
- secure documents, save formats
- Signatures, long-term key management
- DRM
- long-term non-disclosure
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DP Research
Potential areas:
 Information Retrieval:
- large-scale indexing and retrieval
- evolution of semantics and spelling
- modeling forgetting
 Ethics
- privacy, digital personalities and forgetting
- information types and usage + IT support to enforce
 Software Engineering
- DP as systems engineering
- secure workflows and trust
- certification of system for DP fitness
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DP Research
Potential areas:
 Algorithms:
- semantics from code
- cross-compilation
- support for digital archeology
- evolution of the concept of file formats
 Storage:
- advanced storage technologies
- management of large storage systems
- hybrid analog/digital storage
- self-describing/monitoring storage systems
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DP Research
Potential areas:
 User interfaces
- Interfaces of the future
- How to preserve/communicate interfaces long gone by
 Application domains
- effect of the quantum computer on DP of conventional
systems
- mash-ups and distributed applications
- pervasive computing and sensor networks
- virtual worlds
- threat scenarios in DP
- home users
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DP Research
 Many further areas –
basically: all sub-disciplines of IT affected?
 What would be the most challenging research questions in
each of these?
 How can we get experts in these disciplines get involved
with DP research?
 How can we make DP research more solid research by
IT standards?
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Overview
 Why do we need Digital Preservation?
 Digital Preservation Projects in Europe
 IT-oriented Digital Preservation Challenges
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
.................................................
Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
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Preservation Planning
Why Preservation Planning?
 Several preservation strategies developed
- For each strategy: several tools available
- For each tool: several parameter settings available
 How do you know which one is most suitable?
 What are the needs of your users? Now? In the future?
 Which aspects of an object do you want to preserve?
 What are the requirements?
 How to prove in 10, 20, 50, 100 years, that the decision was
correct / acceptable at the time it was made?
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Preservation Planning
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Preservation Planning
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Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
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Hoppla
 Archiving Solutions for
- SME
- SOHO
- Private Users
 No/little expertise
 Service-oriented concept
 Similar to Antivirus Software
 User sends collection profile
 Experts perform Pres. Planning
 Rules for Preservation Actions are
provided
 Combines back-up and migration
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Home
Office
Painless
Persistent
Long-term
Archiving
HOPPLA Principles
 Need for bit-stream and logical object preservation
- combine back-up and migration
 No expertise on and effort for digital preservation issues
- fully automatic solution outsourcing DP expertise,
inspired by current antivirus solutions
 Stability and system independence
- rely on plain file system storage with redundant XML metadata
 Trust and accountability
- aim to fulfill core requirements of audit and certification
initiatives
 Privacy
- data resides with users, control over information sent to server
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HOPPLA Architecture
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Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
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Context of Information
 Digital information objects are not isolated
- Exist in a specific context (to other objects)
 Context is important for
- Correct interpretation
- Establishing authenticity
- Ensuring appropriate use
 Context is difficult to establish/document
 Often missing / incomplete / incorrect when manually
entered
 Automatically extract context of objects
- Establish contextual relations between them, generate
new meta-data
 Visualisation/interaction tool
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Context of Information
Context Dimensions:
 Currently establishing context along
- Time (creation, modification, ...)
- Type, e.g. MIME types
- Contributors / Social: people involved
• Creators, Modifiers, Users
- Content related features
• e.g. same images embedded, same keywords
 Other types of dimensions possible, e.g. concurrent usage
of documents, ...
Applications:
 Ingest of donations, disaster recovery, IR
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Context of Information
Data Warehouse – Snowflake schema
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Context of Information
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Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
.................................................
Evaluation of Emulation
 Testing if significant properties stay intact
 It is well known how to extract and compare significant
properties for migrated objects
 With emulation original object is unchanged,
comparison of a rendered version is necessary
 Detection of a change in behaviour of object
 Interactivity has to be considered (applications, video
games, interactive art)
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Evaluation of Emulation
Goals
 Perform repeatable experiments
 Extract significant properties from the rendering process
 Automatically compare significant properties extracted
from different emulation environments
 Allow preservation planning for emulation environments
 Automate parts of the process of testing emulators
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Evaluation of Emulation
 Different significant states
- target state, series of states, continuous stream
 Extracting properties from emulation environment
- in characterization language (e.g. XCL)
- e.g. cycles, frame rate (average/min/max) number of files/bytes
accessed on I/O devices, event logs, screenshots, video streams
- not supported yet by emulators
 Deterministic behaviour of object necessary
- identify and keep constant causes of non-deterministic behaviour
- e.g. user input, hardware timer values, random seed generation
 Extracting rendered object from emulation environment
- from different levels: system memory, video memory, output
device
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Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
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Recovering Digital Objects from
Audio Wave Form
 Original system Philips G7400 from 1983 encodes data in
audio streams for recording on audio tapes
 Migration Tool to extract the encoded data from the audio
stream and migrate to non-obsolete formats
 Extracted data: Software, screenshots, text & numeric data
 Can read data that is unreadable with original system
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Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
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Preserving Virtual Worlds
 Alternative strategy: not the objects and world data are
extracted but scenes of interaction are recorded
 Drone that moves inside Second Life and video records
areas with user action
 besides technical difficulties ethical and legal issues
.................................................
Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
.................................................
Ethics & Web Archiving
 Web is very volatile
 Web archiving is an essential activity to ensure
valuable content is being preserved
 Web Archives contain a wealth of extremely valuable
information
But:
 Currently most archives are closed to public
 Mostly due to legal reasons
 Need a legal solution
Is this all?
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Ethics & Web Archiving
 What should such a legal solution look like?
 Is it only a legal problem?
 There are things that are legal, but ethically dubious
 (There are things that are illegal, but ethically acceptable)
 Privacy is an essential good
 Most societies are increasingly privacy-aware
 Are there ethical concerns, and if so
- Are we aware of them?
- Can we do something to address them?
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Ethics & Web Archiving
Assumptions and a number of questions:
 The Web is a new publication medium – Is it?
 The ephemeral nature of Web pages is a “design fault” Is it?
 A Web Archive is merely a collection of publicly
available information – Is it?
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Ethics & Web Archiving
Assumptions underlying Web Archiving:
 The Web is a new publication medium?
- Are people “publishing”
(conscious decision, effort invested,…)
- If so, are they aware of it?
- Are kids allowed to publish?
- Which parts of the Web are publishing,
which are communication?
(ako chatting-in-the-bus?)
- Do we have a choice of NOT putting some things on the
Web?
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Ethics & Web Archiving
Assumptions underlying Web Archiving
 The ephemeral nature of Web pages is a “design fault”?
- Post-it notes are based on a “faulty” glue
-> should we put real glue onto them?
- If the Web is a publication medium: may there be some who use it
as such BECAUSE it is ephemeral?
(art, temporary announcements, CV, …)
- Does being ephemeral make it more a communication medium in
the perception of some people?
- Does society need en ephemeral way of communicating with larger
communities in an ephemeral manner?
(speaker’s corner, graffitti, …)
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Ethics & Web Archiving
Assumptions underlying Web Archiving:
 A Web Archive is merely a
collection of publicly available information
- True, but what about Holism?
(The whole is more than the sum of it’s parts)
- Does the ease of use, or the new possibilities of use, change the
nature of an information collection?
(full-text search, semantic analysis, IR as opposed to conventional
archive catalogs)
- Specialized person profile search engines, used by HR departments
(special profile generation services to counter-act this)
- Technical possibilities will increase in the future
(video analysis, semantic analysis, reasoning, …)
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Ethics & Web Archiving
Research Issues:
 What are the ethical constraints, and how they can be
more precisely defined or formalized,
 Which approaches users of Web archives with potentially
dubious intentions might employ to obtain information that
should not be provided by privacy-respecting archives,
 In how far technological solutions such as query analysis,
machine learning and data mining can help in identifying
potentially harmful queries, potentially incriminating
content on Web pages, information worth of protection, or
combinations thereof,
 How legal regulations might be formulated in order to
allow (partial) access to Web archive content in a save,
ethically correct, and useful manner
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Overview
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
- Preservation Planning: PLATO
- Small Home Office Archiving: HOPPLA
- Establishing Context of Digital Information
- Evaluating Emulators
- Recovering Digital Objects from Audio Wave Form
- Preserving Virtual Worlds
- Ethical Issues in Web Archiving
- Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Conclusions
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Digital Preservation Time Capsule
Digital Preservation suffers from
 a lack of public awareness
 solid understanding of the levels of complexity
 being abstract / intangible
 failing to graps people’s imagination
 seeming to be rather simple (only storage?)
even among some experts
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Digital Preservation Time Capsule
The Planets TimeCapsule
 is a scientifically solid & visually appealing showcase
demonstrating general DP challenges & Planets solutions
 is a tangible and exciting demo showing the level of
complexity & the amount of information involved in
preserving a few selected objects
 aims at capturing the public’s and experts imagination,
benefitting from a leveraging effect by involving media
 Constitutes a lasting legacy for Planets
 May serve a basis for training, exhibitions and future
research
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Digital Preservation Time Capsule
The Planets TimeCapsule is inspired by




Voyager Golden Record
Rosetta Stone
Long Now Rosetta Project
Clock for the Long Now
and other initiatives aimed at
making long-term thinking
graspable
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Digital Preservation Time Capsule
 Pick a set of Source Objects
 Describe them with PC-tools and PREMIS metadata
 Add representation information
- file format standards & documentation
- programming language definitions, compiler info
(also for secondary objects)
 Add viewer (binary + source + OS + PREMIS + PC)
 Migrate them to more stable formats
- PA tools: description + source (+ PREMIS + PC)
- PP: plan and evaluation of loss (+ PREMIS + PC)
 Store them on different data carriers
- Carrier description
- Device description
- File system description
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Overview
 Why do we need Digital Preservation?
 Digital Preservation Projects in Europe
 IT-oriented Digital Preservation Challenges
 Some Digital Preservation Research at TUWIEN
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Summary
 Digital Preservation is an important issue
 Affects everybody and in all domains
- cultural heritage, industry, science, society at large





Significant research & development efforts
Number of solid solutions
Number of challenging open research issues
Need to involve core IT experts from different domains
Need to change perspective on DP research:
- from ex-post to pro-active
- from external system to integrated part of all IT system design
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iPRES 02010 Dates
 Paper, Tutorial, Panel & Workshop Submission
5 May 2010
 Notification of Acceptance
18 Jun 2010
 Submission of Final Versions
11 Jul 2010
 iPRES 02010
September 19-25 2010
http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/ipres2010
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Thank you!
http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp
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