Digital Preservation

Digital Preservation – the process of keeping electronic material accessible and usable for longer periods of time – has turned into one of the most pressing challenges within the digital library community. Long-term archiving of digital material is a highly complex and diverse matter. This is partially due to rapid changes and ongoing developments in file formats. At the same time, hardware and information technology infrastructure are subject to constant changes, making the task even more difficult.
A wide variety of institutions and individuals from countless fields have a strong interest in keeping their digital objects accessible and usable over the next decades. Libraries and museums are increasingly digitising their holdings or even holding born-digital content. Insurance companies, the car and aviation industries as well as pharmaceutical companies and others have a strong interest in preserving their data holdings, simulation models, or studies over time. Private users who want to keep their photo, audio, or video collections accessible are a prime target audience. Some institutions may even be required to keep copies of their documents due to legal constraints. For others, providing digital content is a central part of their business model. Basically, an enormous range of material is worth being preserved for different purposes, leading to vast numbers of differing preservation requirements.
Research in Digital Preservation tackles these challenges by addressing the whole life cycle of digital objects as well as their surrounding organizational and technical environment.

Our Work

One core area of activity is the development of Preservation Planning approaches for specifying and evaluating preservation plans according to the particular requirements of stakeholders. The approach builds on Utility Analysis and a thoroughly defined workflow for reaching informed and accountable decisions on which preservation solution to adopt.
Preservation Requirements Analysis and Specification is central to this approach. Requirements are elicited and organised in a tree structure called objective tree. Current research aims at automating the planning procedure and introducing software for supporting the decision process. To achieve this, we are integrating distributed services for preservation action and characterisation and developing best-practice models.
Apart from requirements for institutional settings, Home Archiving is gaining importance to serve the preservation needs of private users and small offices.
We are also working towards analysing and concretising the reference model for an Open Archival Information System .
A further stronghold of digital preservation research is Web Archiving , where we are active in research on building national web archives as well as analysis and mining of web archive data.
Another field of activity is Training , wherein we are working towards better education possibilities in related fields. This includes the development of curricula for digital preservation at universities as well as continuing education in terms of workshops and seminars for professionals.

Fyler of the Digital Preservation Group (PDF)

Contact: Andreas Rauber, Stephan Strodl, Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Mark Guttenbrunner, Petar Petrov , Michael Kraxner, Natascha Surnic

PLANETS

The Vienna Universtity of Technology is one of 16 partners supporting the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) project. Co-funded by the European Union, Planets is a four-year €15 million project which will help organisations in Europe to address the challenges of protecting digital content so that it may be accessed in the long-term. The objective of Planets is to develop systems and tools which will support the accessibility and use of digital cultural and scientific resources, specifically through the development of novel concepts, techniques and tools to preserve the availability of digital resources over time. [Details]

Research Studio Digital Memory Engineering (DME)

The Austrian Research Studio Digital Memory Engineering conducts industry-oriented research and development in the field of digital preservation. The aim of the DME is the development of preservation solutions for the industry with a special focus on SMEs. [Details]

Project Members: Andreas Rauber, Stephan Strodl, Petar Petrov, Michael Greifeneder

DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE)

DPE Coordinated Action (FP6) facilitates pooling of the complementary expertise that exists across the academic research, cultural, public administration and industry sectors in Europe. DPE fosters collaboration and synergies between many existing national and international initiatives across the European Research Area. [Details] Project Members: Stephan Strodl, Robert Neumayer, Carmen Kehrberg, Christoph Becker, Andreas Rauber

DELOS NoE Digital Preservation Testbed

DELOS Digital Preservation Testbed provides an approach to make informed and accountable decisions on which preservation solution to implement in order to preserve digital objects for a given purpose. DPT allows to specify and document digtial preservation requirements and goals and supports an appropriate documentation of the process, experiment and evaluations. It is based on Utility Analysis to evaluate the performance of various solutions against well-defined objectives, and facilitates repeatable experiments in a standardized laboratory setting. [Details]

Project Members: Stephan Strodl, Andreas Rauber, Christoph Becker, Robert Neumayer, Carl Rauch, Christoph Bartenstein

Arbeitskreis Langzeitarchivierung

Project Members: Andreas Rauber, Christoph Becker, Stephan Strodl, Robert Neumayer, Hannes Kulovits

Wissensnetzwerk Digitale Langzeitarchivierung

Digitale Langzeitarchivierung (Dig:LA)
Mitglied des österreichischen Wissensnetzwerk Digitale Langzeitarchivierung (Dig:LA) unter der Koordination des österreichischen Bundesklanzleramtes, des österreichischen Staatsarchivs sowie der österreichischen Nationalbibliothek

Project Members: Andreas Rauber, Christoph Becker, Stephan Strodl, Robert Neumayer, Hannes Kulovits

Nestor Kompetenznetzwerk Langzeitarchivierung

Nestor AP 5 Partner
Mitglied im Nestor Kompetenznetzwerk Langzeitarchivierung, mit Kooperationen im Schwerpunkt Qualifizierung und Ausbildung

Project Members: Andreas Rauber, Christoph Becker, Stephan Strodl, Robert Neumayer, Hannes Kulovits

Summer Schools and seminars

AOLA

The amount of information published on the Internet continues to grow at a tremendous rate. Yet, contrary to conventional publications, little of what is published on the World Wide Web is actually preserved in an archive. The need for creating an archive of the information published on the Web, being part of humankind's cultural heritage, is being recognised by national libraries worldwide, and resulted in the creation of numerous projects addressing these issues. The Austrian National Library (OeNB) together with the Department of Software Technology (IFS) at the Technical University of Vienna, thus initiated the AOLA project (Austrian On-Line Archive). The goal of this project is to build an archive of the Austrian Webspace. Documents will be harvested at certain time intervals to produce snapshots of the Austrian Webspace.[Details]

Project Members: Andreas Rauber

PDF-Security (2005)

Project Members: Andreas Rauber

IWAW

Organizing Committee member: Andreas Rauber