Chapter 18 - Overview of the Testbeds

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Chapter 18

Overview of the Testbeds

The bulk of the rest of Part II concerns the testbed reports which provide acceler-

ated lifetime tests for a variety of datasets over a number of disciplines.Further background to these scenarios are available from the CASPAR project

deliverable D4101 [208] and related material available from the CASPAR deliver-

ables [209]. This work was undertaken in the summer of 2009.

18.1 Typical Preservation Scenarios

The following illustrates a typical scenario which guides the CASPAR solutions for

preservation of any particular digitally encoded piece of information.

General steps occur in each scenario

1. The Designated Community is defined by the repository

2. A variety of information is captured about the object including Access rights

and DRM, high level knowledge, various types of Representation Information

etc

a. These artefacts must themselves be preserved i.e. be usable in the future

3. Preservation Aims must be identified

4. A Preservation Analysis must be carried out

5. Preservation workflows to maintain RepInfo, using Orchestration,

Knowledge manager, RepInfo toolkit and Registry etc.

In the testbed descriptions we will not repeat these common steps for each sce-nario, except for detailing the artefacts such as Access Rights or RepInfo which are

created.

341D. Giaretta, Advanced Digital Preservation, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-16809-3_18,C Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
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342 18 Overview of the Testbeds

18.2 Generic Criteria and Method to Organise

and to Evaluate the Testbeds

18.2.1 Method

The method to evaluate the success or the compliance of the testbeds is based on

an iterative process of tests and feedback reports. Only Designated Community

members can really evaluate the preservation results by access and manipulation;

Authenticity is also crucial.

Scenarios defined in the D4105 are implemented in the testbed, illustrating:

the hardware is changing

the software is changing

the environment is changing (including legal framework)

the knowledge bases of the Designated Communities are changing

18.2.2 Preservation Aims

Examples of preservation aims include:

ability to process a dataset and generate the same data products as previously

ability to re-perform an artistic performance

ability to understand a dataset and use it in analysis tools ability to render images and documents

Checks on the success of the preservation activity must include confirmation that

these aims have been fulfilled and details provided as to how this has been performed

and how, and to what extent, this evidence supports the claim that the CASPAR

approach is valid.


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18.3 Cross References Between Scenarios and Changes 343

18.3 Cross References Between Scenarios and Changes

Table 18.1 Summary of scenarios vs. threats countered

Threat STFC ESA UNESCO IRCAM UnivLeeds CIANT INA

Users may be unable

to understand or use

the data e.g. the seman-

tics, format, processes or

algorithms involved

Non-maintainability of

essential hardware,

software or support

environment may make

the information

inaccessible

The chain of evidence

may be lost and there

may be lack of certainty

of provenance or authen-

ticity

Access and use restric-

tions may make it difficult to

reuse data, or alterna-

tively may not be respec-

ted in future

Loss of ability to iden-

tify the location of data

Not addressed

The current custodian

of the data, whether an

organisation or project,

may cease to exist at

some point in the future

The ones we trust to

look after the digital

holdings may let us

down

Covered by Chap. 25

In their work, each of the testbeds addressed a large number of threats with

many sub-scenarios but we highlight in this table, and in this document, only

those which we believe illustrate the important points.

The scenarios may be classified in a variety of ways, but for convenience in

the following chapters they are presented according to the host organisation. Each

is essentially the report from the testbed and therefore is often written in the first

person.
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Chapter 18 - Overview of the Testbeds