Digital Preservation Console - Feasibility Study
JISC commissioned this report to assess the extent to which it might be possible to develop an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to enable non-specialist information professionals to undertake a variety of preservation and information management tasks with a minimum of preservation-specific theoretical knowledge.
As a first step, a product analysis was carried out looking at a representative range of the available tools and services that might potentially be incorporated into the proposed DP Console. We found that a good selection of robust tools and services are available and that usable Application Programming Interfaces are provided that should readily facilitate their use in an integrated environment. Based on the available evidence there appears to be considerable scope to develop the sort of modular and extensible architecture on which the proposed DP Console would rely. Overall therefore the DP Console was found to be technically viable.
We next conducted a market analysis to investigate the business environment in which the DP Console is intended to operate. In particular, market survey results from previous digital preservation projects were examined and contextualised within the scope of the proposed solution. The purpose of this part of the analysis was to highlight target communities, their expectations from a preservation framework and the digital content most commonly understood as “preservation-worthy”. An examination of the findings of user studies from previous digital preservation projects gives a reasonably clear idea of the requirements for a digital preservation console.
The console should:
- offer reliable support for preservation actions, by incorporating robust tools that can themselves be straightforwardly preserved
- be modular and extensible, so as to allow for alternative services to be seamlessly integrated within the overall system
- include security mechanisms to specify the access levels to functionality for different staff roles within an organisation
- provide tools to identify and validate unknown file formats
- provide migration functionality for a variety of digital content, particularly:
- text documents
- images
- emails
- audiovisual material
The final report is available from the JISC IE Repository
Project Staff
David Anderson
Janet Delve
Leo Konstantelos
Antonio Ciuffreda
Dan Pinchbeck
