Today we’ve just completed our Future-Proofing study at ULCC and sent the final report to the JISC Programme Manager, with hopes of a favourable sign-off so that we can publish the results on our blog.
It was a collaboration between myself and Kit Good, the records manager here at UoL. We’re quite pleased with the results. We wanted to see if we could create preservation copies of core business documents that require permanent preservation, but do it using a very simple intervention and with zero overheads. So we worked with a simple toolkit of services and software that can plug into a network drive; we used open source migration and validation tools. Our case study sought to demonstrate the viability of this approach. Along the way we learned a lot about how Xena digital preservation software operates, and how (combined with Open Office) it makes a very credible job of producing bare-bones Archival Information Packages, and putting information into formats with improved long-term prospects.
The project has worked on a small test corpus of common Institutional digital records, performed preservation transformations on them and conducted systematic evaluation to ensure that the conversions worked, that the finished documents render correctly, that sufficient metadata been generated for preservation purposes, and that it can feasibly be extracted and stored in a database; and that the results are satisfactory and fit for purpose.
The results show us that it is possible to build a low-cost, practical preservation solution that addresses immediate preservation problems, makes use of available open source tools, and requires minimal IT support. We think the results of the case study can feasibly be used by other Institutions facing similar difficulties, and scaled up to apply to the preservation of other and more complex digital objects. It will enable non-specialist information professionals to perform certain preservation and information management tasks with a minimum of preservation-specific theoretical knowledge.
Future-Proofing won’t solve your records management problems, but it stands a chance of empowering records managers by allowing them to create preservation-worthy digital objects out of their organisation’s records, without the need for an expensive bespoke solution.