Supporting the preservation lifecycle in repositories

Abstract

To accomplish effective digital preservation, repositories need to be able to incorporate processes such as planning, monitoring and preservation operations. These processes feed into each other and create a continuous cycle that allows a repository to detect opportunities and risks and act accordingly.

Each of these digital preservation processes have already been extensively studied and tools to support each process have already been developed, but many repository implementations still lack complete and continuous digital preservation features. This paper presents a global view on digital preservation processes and how they fit together in a digital preservation cycle. Furthermore, it describes tools that support these processes and explains how to incrementally integrate them into digital repositories providing a complete systematic and semi-automatic digital preservation system.