Digital Preservation Tools for Repository Managers 3: Describing content for preservation

Abstract

The 5-module JISC KeepIt course on Digital Preservation Tools for Repository Managers was designed by repository managers. Each module consists of a mix of short presentations and hands-on exercises to learn about the basics and gain practice with each of the tools covered. Module 3 is a primer on preservation workflow, formats and characterisation, as preparation for the preservation planning tools to be encountered in module 4. This module opens with an introduction to preservation workflow, a process to manage the risk associated with file formats of different digital objects. Then follows a 6-part presentation on the practical analysis of significant characteristics of digital objects, the characteristics that must be preserved over time in order to ensure the continued accessibility, usability, and meaning of the objects. Part 1 introduces the concepts, while the second part considers the framework produced by the InSPECT project for assessing significant characteristics. Two practical exercises lead participants to determine the properties of a particular type of digital object, an email message, then to consider the needs of different stakeholders when assessing the properties of this type of object. Part 5 seeks out tools capable of extracting and maintaining properties for an archival-scale number of objects, and the final part offers a quick summary of all six parts. Other tools are available to describe preservation of digital objects. A short introduction to preservation metadata and PREMIS involves a practical exercise to show how information already being collected by digital repositories can be described by entries in the PREMIS Data Dictionary. Provenance is a record of the process that led to the current state of an object, and a new descriptive model designed to allow provenance information to be exchanged between systems, the Open Provenance Model (OPM), is described briefly based on slides provided by Luc Moreau, the leader of the standardisation effort for OPM. Details of the exercises on significant characteristics are contained within the presentations, and supplementary materials to support the practicals in other presentations are provided, so the full course module can be experienced by other users.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Luc Moreau: orcid.org/0000-0002-3494-120X

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