Content Management and Digital PreservationOrganisations are increasingly creating integrated systems to manage their live content as it is authored, approved, disseminated and deleted. They are also realising the need to retain information for long periods. How do you meet these requirements and create a whole life information management approach that provides information access whenever it is needed?

Content ManagementDigital information is the lifeblood of modern organisations, whether it is email, documents, web sites, transactions or other forms of knowledge.

The process of managing this information is becoming increasingly controlled covering its creation, authoring, review, versioning, approval for release, the mechanisms for sharing and disposal of information.

This sort of information management often concerns live information – it is changeable dynamically and often published live on the internet. Much of this is disposable, but much must be retained for the various purposes.

The effective control and management of this dynamic information is a critical part of organisations and is often encapsulated in a set of business rules captured within a Content Management System (CMS).

Records ManagementRecords Management adds rules regarding retention and disposal of the content within a CMS. It has its own standard, ISO 15489, which covers the concept of records, how theyaredefined,described,retainedanddestroyed.

Recordsneedtobedefinedforcomplianceor other reasons. Records are logical pieces of information that will not be changed once under management. This introduces the concept of information preservation, information which has a prescribed lifetime defininghowlongitmustberetainedanywho is able to see it.

Record preservation however is only at a logicallevel,definingrulesstoppingthedestruction of records before the end of their life. This is not the same as the strategies need to ensure the information is readable and usable.

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Archival Information ManagementWhether under records management or just within the content management system there comes a time when information is no longer needed day to day but is still potentially useful or is required for regulatory or legal compliance. The decision is made to keep it safe but keeping it in the live content store makes the knowledge set more cluttered and may compromise performance.

When the information is needed however it must be easily found and easy to use. It must be protected against being lost, corrupted or becoming unreadable.

Why Do I Need to Digital Preservation?Instinctively organisations know why they need to keep information – to reduce risk and to gain value for the knowledge it captures. This can be categorised as:

• Knowledge re-cycling. Sweat those digital assets to gain more from their value

• Regulatory Compliance. Prove you are following the regulations for your business quickly and without fuss

• Legal Evidence. Have the details at yourfingertipsshouldyoufacealegalchallenge or wish to pursue a case.

All of these drivers point to the need for a good quality digital preservation solution

What is Digital Preservation?Digital Preservation is a different discipline to Content Management and has different drivers. It is covered by its own standard (ISO 14721:2003) that dictates the key features a comprehensive Digital Preservation solution should have.

The key features of a Digital Preservation system are:

• IngestSystem:Methodforefficientlyandsecurely moving content into the archive

• Archival Storage: Caring for the digital objects, making sure they are unchanged and safe

• Data Management: controlling how the digital objects are structured and described, and disposing of them at the appropriate moment.

• Administration: controlling access to digital objects

• Access: allowing the objects to be found and downloaded to appropriate users

• Preservation: making sure the digital objects are usable at the time they are required by technologies accessible to the users.

This latter point turns out to be a major problem in today’s very fast moving technology world.

Why Digital Preservation is hard Information held digitally is highly fragile. It is easy for the bits to become unreadable on corrupted media or lost on removable media. There are plenty of horror stories of material of critical importance being held on tapes that no one can read.

Even after you have the bits held somewhere safe and protected the problems do not stop. IT is continually updating andthefileformatsoftodaycanbecomeunreadable by the software and IT systems of tomorrow surprisingly quickly – you have the bits but cannot make any sense of them.

Digital Preservation must have an inbuilt “Active Preservation” system. This will use thebesttoolsavailabletorecyclefilesintoformats that can be read today and to do so in a way that is automated and validated, and that preserves the full behaviour of the digital objects, not just their appearance.

Selecting the right tools is a job for specialists. Preservica pools expertise from the world’s leading archives, libraries and academia to provide a professional service build on advanced research.

Digital Preservation and CMSContent Management Systems and Digital Preservation do different but overlapping jobs. There are functional similarities like:

• Security rules on content access

• Businessrulesimplementusingworkflows

• Flexible data descriptions

• Retention management rules to dispose of content are the right time

There are also features that are obviously or subtly different, see the table below.

Preservica’s Active Digital Preservation TechnologyPreservica has been selected by innovative archives and libraries in 7 countries across 3 continents and was recently awarded the Queens Award for Enterprise Innovation. Integrating this technology with a good CMS makes archiving innovation available to those who just need the archiving challenge to be solved without fuss.

Feature Content Management Digital PreservationContent versioning Yes, controlled No,fixed

Access speed Fast, immediate Slow, can wait

File format obsolescence Not a problem Major concern

Data volumes Generally smaller Can be huge: wide variety of sources accumulated over large timescales

Bit level protection Yes, but smaller volumes make this less of a concern

Yes, made worse by large volumes and long timescales

Download tools Using same system that created the content

May use very different technology

Specificusage Yes, implemented for specificbusinessneeds

May take content from multiple sources

Whole Life Information ManagementTo deliver whole life information management we need to combine the functionality of both content management and digital preservation. This functional integration must offer:

• Contentfindingtools(search,browse,download)

• Business rules to dictate when content ismoved to the archive

• Integrated security rules

• Federated or combined search

• Consistently applied retentionmanagement rules

There are many questions to be answered to determine the appropriate integration approach – is transfer to the archive performed automatically or manually? Is the archive an invisible black box embedded inside the CMS or a separate system accepting content from multiple sources? Is a Records Management System in control?

Further ReadingFor a good paper covering a full comparison of Content Management and the OAIS Archiving Standard please see the following:

“Digital Preservation for Enterprise Content: A Gap Analysis between ECM and OAIS (J.Korb and S. Strodl, 2012)” http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_191180.pdf

Next StepsPreservica can help you answer these questions as part of an organisational review of information lifecycle management and technology choices. Contact us at info@preservica.com

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