Vienna University of Technology
Information & Software Engineering Group

DELOS Digital Preservation Testbed

 
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Motivation

Testbed

Software

DELOS

Motivation

With the rapid technological changes, digital preservation, i.e. the endeavor to provide long-term access to digital objects, is turning into one of the most pressing challenges to ensure the survival of our digital artefacts. A set of strategies has been proposed, with a range of tools supporting parts of digital preservation actions. Yet, with requirements on which strategy to follow and which tools to employ being different for each setting, depending e.g. on object characteristics or institutional requirements, deciding which solution to implement has turned into a crucial decision. DELOS Digital Preservation Testbed provides an approach to make informed and accountable decisions on which solution to implement in order to preserve digital objects for a given purpose. 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.

 

Testbed

The Vienna University of Technology developed in cooperation with the National Archive Netherlands, both parts of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, a framework for choosing the optimal preservation solution for individual requirements.

The benefits of the Delos Digital Testbed are,

  • a simple, methodologically sound model to specify and document DP requirements and goals
  • structured setting for evaluating performance of alternative preservation actions
  • appropriate documentation of the process, experiment and evaluations
  • well-argumented, completely traceable ranking of different preservation strategies
  • generic workflow that can easily be integrated in different institutional settings
 

 

Software

The Vienna University of Technology developed a webbased Software, which supports the Digital Preservation Framework Workflow.

Digital Preservatoin Testbed Software

 

DELOS

Part of the work is sponsored by DELOS Network of Excellence funded by the EU's Sixth Framework Programme, IST – 507618


DELOS Digital Preservation Cluster

 
 
 
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last edited 05.09.2006 by Stephan Strodl