Implementation Strategies Subgroup

NEW! Implementing Preservation Repositories For Digital Materials: Current Practice And Emerging Trends In The Cultural Heritage Community. (PDF:668K/66pp.)

Read the latest activity update.

Responsibilities

The Implementation Strategies Subgroup is responsible for two items of the charge:

  1. Examination and evaluation of alternative strategies for the encoding, storage, and management of preservation metadata within a digital preservation system, as well as for the exchange of preservation metadata between systems.

    Strategy:

    Draft a survey intended for preservation repositories in operation or under development. Write up a summary. Distribute first to PREMIS Working Group as a pre-test, then to an external list of the Advisory Committee and other identified repositories. Collect, review and evaluate responses. Summarize and evaluate alternative strategies. Distribute to Premis working group for discussion in plenary call. (July-December)

  2. Pilot programs for testing the group's recommendations and best practices in a variety of systems settings.

    Strategy:

    Solicit volunteers from all PREMIS members with implementations in production or under development for those willing to incorporate PREMIS data elements into their preservation metadata. When Core Elements group has a draft data dictionary, give volunteers time to implement and report. Devise a list of questions the reports should address, such as which data elements were not implemented and why, how data values were supplied, problems or questions raised, etc. (January - June)

Activity Reports

The subgroup is having periodic conference calls and has accomplished the following:

December 2004: The group is reviewing the data dictionary. For each semantic unit, we are discussing how that metadata could be supplied and adding Creation/maintenance notes when applicable. Is the element best created by the submitter or the repository? Can it be automatically derived or must it be manually supplied. Is it the type of information that could be communally maintained, for example, in a central registry?

September 2004: The survey report, Implementing Preservation Repositories for Digital Materials: Current Practice and Emerging Trends in the Cultural Heritage Community (PDF:668K/66pp.), is available from this website. The group is continuing to analyse implementation models.

August 2004: Work on the survey report is continuing. The anticipated release date is now September 2004.

June 2004: Work on the survey report is continuing. The anticipated release date is now August 2004.

May 2004: The statistical (quantitative) summary of survey responses was posted on this website. A longer version containing analysis based on interviews as well as surveys is being drafted for review by the Advisory Committee in July. Members are also working on summarizing models for implementing preservation repositories.

April 2004: Subgroup members are arranging telephone interviews with contact persons at 18 institutions. Interviews will focus on gathering more in-depth information about a repository's practices in a limited number of areas. The intent is to produce a descriptive white paper with some analysis on the state of the art. At the same time, a simple statistical summary of the 48 survey responses is being prepared.

March 2004: The group continued reviewing survey responses, identifying institutions to contact for more information, and drafting follow-up questions.

February 2004: The subgroup began analysing results from 45 Implementation Surveys. (Late responses will be folded into the analysis as they are received.) Issues that we are looking at include: How are preservation repositories informed by OAIS? What constituencies are repositories being developed to serve, and what kinds of agreements do they have with their depositors? How do repositories obtain metadata? What kind of metadata are repositories recording and what schemes are they using? What rights information is needed? How are repositories implementing access to deposited materials? What preservation strategies are being implemented or planned? Are there general organizational and architectural models that reponsitories fall into? Answers gleaned from the surveys will be followed up with phone interviews of selected insitutions.

January 2004: More than 30 Implementation Surveys were returned by mid-month. A second set of surveys was mailed to museums and is due in mid February. We thank everyone who took the time to complete a survey. The subgroup is compiling a summary of results and will start analysing them in February.

November 2003: November 2003: The Implementation survey was sent to Working Group and Advisory Group members and to the list of external recipients. The survey was posted to the website and an announcement was made on several major preservation and digital library-oriented lists. Responses are due January 16, 2004.

October 2003: Implementation Survey responses were reviewed. The survey instrument was revised based on this review and comments from Advisory Committee members. A revised survey is ready for dissemination as soon as the list of recipients is finalized.

September 2003: The Implementation Survey was finalized and sent to PREMIS Working Group members as a pre-test with a 9/26/03 deadline. Seven responses were received.

August 2003: The Implementation Survey was drafted and has been sent to a couple of external reviewers for comments.

July 2003: We agreed on a list of questions we want to answer with the survey and began drafting the survey instrument itself.