CRiB: preservation services for Digital Repositories

Abstract

The purpose of this communication is to introduce the CRiB [18-20], a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) [21] that provides preservation services for common digital repository applications such as DSpace, Eprints or Fedora. Among those services we would like to point out the following: - A service to enable client repositories and their holding institutions to perform format migrations. The CRiB automatically combines an assortment of migration services to produce the necessary transformations between two given formats. - When migration strategies are in place, data loss or at least some sort of object degradation is expected to take place. The CRiB automatically evaluates the outcome of each object transformation in terms of conversion performance, status of the involved formats and loss of object' s significant properties. This evaluation report is used to document the preservation event [22] and to train the recommendation service (see the following point). - The CRiB provides a recommendation service that determines the optimal migration strategy within the wide range of choices, thus acting as a decision support centre for client institutions. It works by confronting the preservation requirements of each individual institution with accumulated knowledge about the behaviour of each supported converter (e.g. cost, speed, colour preservation, textual content preservation, etc.).