Mariella Guercio: (Keynote) Conceptual framework and chain of custody for sustaining the digital trustworthiness

With reference to the subject of my presentation I would like to stress the relevance of a consistent conceptual framework and of the robustness of the methodological approach when the digital curation and preservation will transform the traditional environment. The fragmentation in implementing the organizational and the technological solutions of the investments  implies the risk of loosing the quality of the investments.

Specifically I would like to focus on the needs for a holistic approach on the whole digital heritage, of course with respect of the specificity of each domain but also with the capacity of planning a system able to provide compatible solutions and integrated for all the digital respositories and digital contents created and acquired by the creators with reference to the policies for accessioning, the procedures and the metadata/attributes/elements for the retrieval and the authenticity, the chain of responsibilities.

 

Andreas Rauber: Home Archiving: Moving Digital Preservation Capabilities from Large Institutions to SMEs and Home Users

While large heritage institutions have been addressing the challenges posed by digital preservation need for some time, small institutions are less prepared to handle them, be it due to lacks of funding, expertise or awareness. Yet, tremendous amounts of valuable digital assets are being held by smaller institutions, small and medium enterprises, and - last, but not least - by virtually everybody on their home computers, digital cameras and mobile phones.

This talk will present the HOPPLA system addressing the challenge of automating digital preservation activities to a level where it can be seamlessly and transparently integrated into daily operations, not requiring specific expertise in digital preservation issues. It addresses both bit-level as well as logical preservation, outsourcing preservation planning expertise to external service providers, while integration appropriate migration activities in an automated and transparent manner.

 

Tore Hoel: Metadata in the wild - the laborious creation of a new international standard for describing learning resources

For a number of years the International standards organisation (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36) has struggled to come up with a new metadata standard for learning resources. The MLR standard was supposed to be compatible with with Dublin Core and IEEE LOM, the first metadata standard in the Learning, Education and Training domain. When the shortcomings of LOM were discovered, the long and laborious process of agreeing upon a new and "future proof" framework for MLR started. The presentation will outline the principles underlying the upcoming MLR standard and reflect on the process of international standardisation.

 

Sarah Currier: If You Tag it, Will They Come? Metadata Quality and Repository Management

When we build collections of scholarly works, learning materials, or other educational "stuff", we want people to be able to find it. This raises a number of problems, including ensuring that resources are tagged with adequate metadata. In 2004 a pioneering paper on this issue noted:

"At its best, “accurate, consistent, sufficient, and thus reliable” (Greenberg & Robertson, 2002) metadata is a powerful tool that enables the user to discover and retrieve relevant materials quickly and easily and to assess whether they may be suitable for reuse. At worst, poor quality metadata can mean that a resource is essentially invisible within the repository and remains unused." (Currier et al, 2004).

Have the five years since the above-quoted paper was published borne out its prediction: that simply expecting resource authors to create their own metadata at upload would lead to metadata of insufficient quality? Have repository managers been able to persuade funders that including professional metadata augmentation is worth the money? What has been the impact of recent Web developments allowing easier exposure, searching and sharing of resources? How is metadata being treated within the emerging domain of open educational resources? And what does all this mean for repository managers wanting to increase the discoverability of their resources, and to implement workflows for creation of good quality metadata?

 

Johanna Puhl: The PLANETS-Ontology in the context of the PLANETS-Testbed and the XCL-Software

Within the EC-funded project "Planets": "Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services", the subproject Testbed delivers a web-service containing different experiment-pathways in order to find the best services for long-term preservation of digital objects. 

Such services can be characterisation, migration and emulation.

In a scenario, where a librarian/archivist tries to find the best tools and destination-formats for a certain file-collection in an automated procedure, an ontology that constitutes relations between different file-format properties as well as properties of metadata-formats is very desirable and can fundamentally support an evaluation of these tools.

The XCL-Ontology is one part of the XCL-Software developed in cologne for the PLANETS-Subproject "Preservation Characterisation" and constitutes different experiment-tools in the Planets-Testbed.

In this presentation the XCL-Ontology and it's overall-structure will be explained and it will be described how the Ontology fulfils the different needs of the user-community in the context of digital preservation and PLANETS.