This one-day event on 31 October 2014 was organised by the DPC. After lunch Sarah Middleton of the DPC reported on progress from the 4C Project on the costs of curation. The big problem facing the digital preservation community is that the huge volumes of data we are expected to manage are increasing dramatically, yet our budgets are shrinking. Any investment we make must be strategic and highly targeted, and collaboration with others will be pretty much an essential feature of the future. To assist with this, the 4C project has built the Curation Exchange platform, which will allow participating institutions to share – anonymised, of course – financial data in a way that will enable the comparison of costs. The 4C project has worked very hard to advance us beyond the simple “costs model” paradigm, and this dynamic interactive tool will be a big step in the right direction.
William Kilbride then described the certification landscape, mentioning Trusted Digital Repositories, compliance with the OAIS Model, and the Trusted Repositories Audit & Certification checklist, and the evolution of European standards DIN 31644 and the Data Seal of Approval. William gave his personal endorsement to the Data Seal of Approval approach (it has been completed by 36 organisations, and another 30 are in progress of doing it), and suggested that we all try an exercise to see how many of the 16 elements we felt we could comply with. After ten minutes, a common lament was “there are things here beyond my control…I can’t influence my depositors!”
William went on to discuss tools for digital preservation. Very coincidentally, he had just participated in the DPC collaborative “book sprint” event for the upcoming new DPC Handbook, and helped to write a chapter on this very topic. Guess what? There are now more tools for digital preservation than we know what to do with. The huge proliferation of devices we can use, for everything from ingest to migration to access, has developed into a situation where we can hardly find them any more, let alone use them. William pins his hopes on the Tools Registry COPTR, the user-driven wiki with brief descriptions of the functionality and purpose of hundreds of tools – but COPTR is just one of many such registries. The field is crowded out with competitors such as the APARSEN Tool Repository, DCH-RP, the Library of Congress, DCEX…ironically, we may soon need a “registry of tool registries”.
Our host James Mortlock described the commercial route his firm had taken in building a bespoke digital repository and cataloguing tool. His project management process showed him just how requirements can evolve in the lifetime of a project – what they built was not what they first envisaged, but through the process they came up with stronger ideas about how to access content.
Kurt Helfrich’s challenge was not only to unify a number of diverse web services and systems at RIBA, but also to create a seamless entity in the Cloud that could meet multiple requirements. RIBA’s in a unique position to work on system platforms and their development, because of their strategic partnership with the V&A, a partner organisation with whom they even share some office space. The problem he faces is not just scattered teams, but one of mixed content – library and archive materials in various states of completion regarding their digitisation or cataloguing. Among his solutions, he trialled the Archivists’ Toolkit which served him so well in California; and the open-source application Archivematica, with an attached Atom catalogue and Duracloud storage service. A keen adaptor of tools, Kurt proposed that we look at the POWRR tool grid, which is especially suitable for small organisations; and Bit Curator, the digital forensics systems from Chapel Hill.