The 4th DELOS Summer School: Digital Preservation in Digital Libraries

The 4th DELOS International Summer School on digital library technologies was held in Sophia-Antipolis Science Park, France, over 5-11 June 2005. The school was concerned with the issues surrounding the long-term preservation of information in digital form, based on a programme put together by Seamus Ross of the University of Glasgow and Digital Curation Centre, UK, and Hans Hofman of the Nationaal Archief, Netherlands. Students, both computer scientists and practitioners with experience of dealing with digital objects, came from all parts of the world. The event was organised by PRESERV of the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries and co-sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre and ERPANET.

Aerial view of Sophia Antipolis Science Park, Côte d'Azur, France. Photo courtesy of JJ.L'Héritier/C.A.D.

The school got under way on the evening of Sunday 5 June with an overview and introduction by Seamus Ross. The next day the school began the first of ten 3-hour themed sessions over that week, each led by one or more tutors. David Giaretta of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Digital Curation Centre (UK) led the opening session, an introduction to the increasingly influential Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS). While most of the entities defined by OAIS - i.e., ingest, archival storage, administration, access, data management - could be seen to be applicable to other types of service, David noted that the preservation planning function was unique, representing the active tasks of monitoring the technical environment and designated community to ensure that information stored in an OAIS remains accessible.

Next came Michael Day of UKOLN, University of Bath, UK, who provided an introduction to the role of metadata in preservation. His initial presentation argued that collecting and maintaining metadata was essential to the long-term preservation of digital information and elaborated some of the different preservation functions that it could support, in part based on the information types identified by the OAIS information model. Michael also looked at metadata initiatives with relevance to digital preservation including the recently published PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata.

Anne R. Kenney of Cornell University, USA, focused on the development of institutional responses to digital preservation and the pre-eminence of organisational will and resources over technological considerations if success is to be achieved. Anne explained how Cornell had merged the OAIS functional entities with the attributes of trusted digital repositories identified by the Working Group on Digital Archive Attributes and then mapped Cornell's processes to the merged model. She also outlined five organisational stages of digital preservation which led to the conclusion that preservation is dependent on inter-institutional collaboration and co-operation.

Stephan Heuscher of iKeep Digital Archives Services, Switzerland, addressed workflows and workflow modelling and maintained they were useful for supporting automation, traceability and the sharing of implicit knowledge.

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard of the State and University Library in Århus, Denmark, spoke on the management of ingest. This focused in the main on Web resources. Birte then introduced different methods of ingest with reference to various Danish initiatives, including the use of harvesting techniques by Web archives and institutional repositories.

Andreas Rauber of Vienna University of Technology, Austria, and Hans Hofman jointly led the session based on work undertaken by the DELOS Digital Preservation cluster on the development of testbeds for the consistent measurement and evaluation of digital preservation strategies.

They noted that such testbeds could inform the selection of preservation strategies and help to document the decision-making process. They emphasised the finding that testbeds provide a consistent experimental environment that encourages those selecting strategies to examine preservation objectives and to decide which evaluation criteria are most important.

David Giaretta returned to address the key OAIS concept of representation information. The OAIS model defines this as the "information that maps a Data Object into more meaningful concepts." David argued that the existence of persistent and trusted registries of representation information would support the sharing of effort.

Amadeus Building, Sophia Antipolis Science Park, photo courtesy G.Martinez/C.A.D.

Ross Harvey of Charles Sturt University, Australia, emphasised the importance of making documented decisions about selection when preserving digital materials. His session surveyed current thinking on selection and appraisal and noted that digital materials were different from traditional ones because preservation decisions needed to be made early in their lifecycle as well as the problems of quantity and high maintenance costs.

Manfred Thaller of the University of Cologne (Universität zu Köln), Germany, led the final session on digital libraries as persistent collections of autonomous objects. This session underlined the importance of autonomy, i.e. that digital objects must be able to survive even if the system of which it was a part is destroyed.

The 2005 DELOS Summer School was a useful opportunity to spend a week discussing digital preservation issues with a highly informed and motivated set of students. Initial feedback also suggested that the school had been useful for students, raising the possibility that the event could be repeated.

Further information on the summer school, including session plans and tutor biographies, is available on the DELOS Digital Preservation cluster website.

Further information:

• DELOS Digital Preservation (PRESERV) cluster website
  http://www.dpc.delos.info/
• The 4th DELOS International Summer School
  http://www.dpc.delos.info/ss05/index.php
• Digital Curation Centre
  http://www.dcc.ac.uk/
• ERPANET
  http://www.erpanet.org/

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