Tag Archives: digital archiving

A preservation workflow using our toolkit

Kit Good will describe a potential records management workflow using these open source tools. This post describes a potential preservation workflow. Since UoL does not yet have a dedicated digital preservation service, this workflow will have to remain hypothetical, but the gist of it is whether these tools can succeed in creating preservable objects with sufficient technical metadata to ensure long-term continuity.

Ingest

The records to be preserved would arrive as Submission Information Packages (SIP). As a first step we would want to ingest selected records into the digital archive repository we haven’t got yet. In our hypothetical scenario, this would probably be done by the records manager (much the same way he transfers records of permanent value to the University archivist). If we had a digital archivist, all we would need is an agreed methodology between that person and the records manager, for example a web-based front end like Dropbox that allows us to move the files from one place to another, with some metadata and other documentation.

Validation

At a bare minimum, the archive service would want to run the following QA steps on the submitted records:

  1. Fixity
  2. Virus check
  3. Confirm submission formats can be supported in the repository

DROID can perform some of these steps for us with its built-in checksum, and the way it identifies formats by comparing them with its online registry. (This would need to align itself with a written preservation policy of some sort). At the moment we lack a virus checker, but it would not be unfeasible to use an open source virus checker such as Avast. This is one step where the DPSP works out nicely, with its built-in virus check and quarantine stage.

Next, we might want to validate the formats in more detail, since DROID doesn’t look at the signature of the file formats. This is where JHOVE comes in, although the limitations of that tool with regard to Office documents have already been noted.

You’ll notice by this point we are not advocating use of the NZ Metadata Extraction Tool, since its output has been found a bit lacking, but this would be the stage to deploy it.

Transformation

Next step is to normalise the records using Xena. This action is as close as we get to migration in our repository and the actions of Xena have already been described.

These steps create a little “bundle” of objects:

  • The DROID report in CSV format
  • The JHOVE output in XML format
  • The normalised Xena object in .xena format

For our purposes, this bundle represents the archival copy which in OAIS terms is an Archival Information Package (AIP). The DROID and JHOVE files are our technical metadata, while the actual data we want to keep is in the Xena file.

Move to archive

Step four would be to move this AIP bundle into archival storage, keeping the “original” submissions elsewhere in the managed store.

Access

A fifth step would be to re-render the Xena objects as dissemination copies, as needed when requested by a member of staff who wanted to have access to a preserved record. For this, we would open the Xena object using the Xena viewer and create a Dissemination Information Package (DIP) version by clicking the OpenOffice button to produce a readable document. (As noted previously, we can also make this OO version into a PDF).

This access step creates yet more digital objects. In fact if we look at the test results for the 12 spreadsheets in our test corpus, we have created the following items in our bundle:

  • One DROID file which analysed all 12 spreadsheets – in CSV
  • One JHOVE file which analysed all 12 spreadsheets – in XML
  • 12 normalised Xena objects – in XENA
  • A test Open Office rendition of one the spreadsheets in ODS
  • A PDF rendering of that OO version

In a separate folder, there are 12 MET files in XML – one for each spreadsheet

In real life we certainly wouldn’t want to keep all of these objects in the same place; the archival files must be stored separately from the dissemination versions.

Checking

Many of the above stages present opportunities for a checksum script to be run, to ensure that the objects have not been corrupted in the processes of transformation and moving them in and out of the archival store. If we wanted to go further with checking, we would re-validate the files using JHOVE.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But there are quite a few preservation gaps with this bare-bones toolkit.

Gap #1

The technical metadata outputs from DROID and JHOVE are all “loose”, not tightly fused with the object they actually relate to. To put it another way, the processes described above have involved running several separate actions on the object that is the target for preservation. It has also created several separate outputs, which have landed in several different destinations on my PC.

We could manually move everything into a “bundle” as suggested above, but this is extra work and feels a bit insecure and unreliable. For real success, we need a method (a database, perhaps) that manages all the loose bits and pieces under a single UID, or other reliable retrieval method. Xena does create such a UID for each of its objects – it’s visible there in the dc:identifier tag. So we may stand a chance of using that element in future iterations of this work.

Another thing which may seem trivial, but JHOVE, DROID and Xena can do batch processing, and MET cannot. This results in a mismatch of outputs, and the outputs are created in different formats.

There is also some duplication among the detail of the technical metadata that has been extracted from the objects.

Gap #2

Ideally we’d like the technical metadata to be embedded within a single wrapper, along with the object itself. The Xena wrapper seems the most obvious place for this. I lack the technical ability to understand how to do it, though. What I would like is some form of XML authoring tool that enables me to write the DROID and JHOVE output directly into the Xena wrapper.

Gap #3

All the steps described above are manual. Obviously if we were going to do this on a larger scale we would want to automate the actions. This is not surprising and we knew this would be the case before we embarked on the project, but it’s good to see the extent to which our workflow remains non joined-up.

Gap #4

Likewise, our audit trail for preservation actions is a bit distributed. Both DROID and JHOVE give us a ‘Last Modified’ date for each object processed, and Xena embeds naa:last-modified within the XML output for each object, but ideally these dates ought to be retrievable by the preservation metadata database and presented as a kind of linear chain of events. We’d also like to have a field identifying what the process was that triggered the ‘Last Modified’ date.

Gap #5

How we manage the descriptive metadata in this process? In order to deliver a DIP to our consumer, they would have to know the record exists and want to know something useful about it to enable them to retrieve it. We have confirmed that descriptive metadata survives the Xena process, but how can we expose it for our users?

What we’re talking about here is a searchable front end to the archival store which we haven’t yet built. Kit is proposing a structured file store for his records, so maybe we need to expand on this approach and think about ways of delivering a souped-up archival catalogue for these assets.

Meeting up

It is always great to share ideas and experiences with others in your field, and so the meeting of the Digital infrastructure programme – of which our project is part – was enjoyable and very useful.

The first thing, after arriving at the impressive LSE Library building, was to introduce ourselves and provide some 5 min presentations on our projects. A full list is here: 
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/12-11projectlist.aspx

Through our project and my growing general interest, digital archiving techniques are helping me to shape some new approaches to more conventional electronic records management problems.

The outcome of Manchester’s Caracanet Case Study, which deals with the acquisition and preservation of email accounts, will be invaluable to records managers trying to define approaches to managing emails as records across their organisations.

The Institute of Education’s Digital Directorate project was interesting to me as archivists approaching essentially a records management challenge. The inter-disciplinary approach can surely only benefit both fields.

I am a keen advocate of training and awareness and several projects – DICE, PrePARE, SHARD – looked at ways of engaging the producers of research data with preservation issues. I’ll also be very interested in the outcomes of Bristol’s DataSafe project. There are so many methods now of delivering training; these projects should give some useful pointers to what works best and what our target audiences want.

The discussions that followed covered the value and benefits of digital preservation and how best to establish a business case for DP projects. I’m still convinced that it will be the hard numbers around reduced storage costs that will give a bedrock to the other DP benefits. The implied processes of appraisal and selection around what groups of records to keep will surely give us the opportunity to get rid of the huge amounts of unstructured information many organisations are storing.

There was a debate about the best approaches to ‘community engagement’ around digital preservation, including an account of a previous three day ‘hackathon’ as part of the AQuA project. Whilst I am a big fan of listservs and online forums, this event showed that getting a few people in a room to share their experience is still the best way to build and maintain a ‘community’.

Thanks to JISC and the SPRUCE project for organising and to the attendees for a really enjoyable and useful meeting.

Adapting OAIS for records management

In planning this project we’re obviously referencing the OAIS standard for a digital archive.

To quote from Wikipedia, ‘Open Archival Information System (or OAIS) is an archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems, that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community’.

The OAIS approach reminds me of the old style paper records store method for managing records. We (the records manager) receive the closed files and store them safely and securely. When a record is required we are asked by the department for a specific box or file. We then make it available.

This is being replicated in several ways in current records management approaches. At one conference I heard of one organisation moving its paper files to offsite storage, then providing a ‘scan on demand’ approach when a file was requested. The offsite store would provide a scanned copy and email it to the requesting department. I thought this was a nice way of sidestepping a massive digitisation project – a digital ‘copy’ is provided when required, the mass of original paper retained in a low-cost storage environment.

In-house electronic document management solutions, from a simple intranet to a full blown EDRMS, have often relied on the information being available instantly via a search.  That obviously relies on the quality of the stored records and speed / accuracy of the search engine.

Could the OAIS approach work in an internal business context? Can the electronic records be submitted or ‘declared’ to the records management team and stored. The records with long term retention converted into preservable formats. On demand, the records can be made available through a print to PDF facility. The audit trail of access is inherent in the very record produced.

There are several visual depictions of the standard on produced on page 4-1 on http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf, to which I add my ‘scrawled on the back of a napkin’ version to explain how this approach might work:

The benefit, you’d hope, would be ‘future proofed’ electronic documents managed and made available at a reasonable cost over decades. The drawbacks would, perhaps be in the user experience where people are used to the instant search return of a Google query. Now the user would effectively be searching a catalogue of record references and requesting access to the one they want.

The challenge is: would the approach actually work? That is one of the things we are trying to explore with this project.

Kicking off…

My name is Kit Good, University Records Manager and Freedom of Information Officer at the University of London. I’m lucky enough to work in an institution where the technology department, the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), has a dedicated Digital Archiving team with a lot of experience in delivering preservation projects around electronic records.

 I’d met with Ed Pinsent, Digital Archivist, several times since I started last year to discuss the challenges around electronic records management. It was back at the start of September when Ed approached me about submitting a bid to the JISC 12/11 Digital Infrastructure Programme.

Ed and Kit

Our bid proposed testing the concept of ‘a simple toolkit of services and software that can plug into a network drive and create preservation copies of core business documents that require permanent preservation’. We were delighted to find out earlier this month that our bid was successful. 

We are hoping that the outcomes of this project will be useful to records managers, the digital archivist community and the Higher Education Sector as a whole. This blog will track the development of the project from its November kick-off to its February close.

More posts to follow…