Arkivum, Artefactual, the Open Preservation Foundation and Preservica collaborate on new Jisc initiative for sharing preservation action best-practice

The Preservation Action Registry (PAR) project will deliver an initial proof-of-concept platform for the exchange of recommended preservation actions, as part of the Jisc Research Data Shared Service (RDSS) pilot program.

27 June 2018 | In a new initiative supported by Jisc, Preservica, Arkivum, the Open Preservation Foundation and Artefactual will work together to deliver a proof-of-concept Preservation Action Registry (PAR) to exchange preservation action best practice within the preservation community and between different preservation systems. This exchange of preservation knowledge and its practical implementation has the potential to vastly accelerate the pace of digital preservation research and the deployment of best practice to live systems.

The collaborative project will focus on the mechanisms of exchanging and sharing preservation action best practice across diverse systems by focusing on protocols for exchange, a common data model and the deployment of APIs to read and write recommendations. Initially, the project will be aimed at the needs of UK HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) participating in the Jisc RDSS (Research Data Shared Service) allowing researchers to receive and act upon the latest Preservation advice - increasing the value of the RDSS to the UK academic community.

The project will be open from the outset and publish the PAR protocols and data model under an open source licence so that the wider digital preservation community can participate and be involved in future development. The PAR will allow organisations to openly share their preservation actions, which holds the potential for a revolution in the automated exchange of research and production advice between practitioners, academics, sector specialists and vendors. This ensures that the advice and tools offered to end users are as up to date as possible and helps turn the promise of fully automated digital preservation into a reality.

Jon Tilbury, Founder and CTO, Preservica “We are excited to be collaborating and contributing to this new initiative. No one organisation can work out all the answers, so the exchange of recommended preservation actions has the potential to not just benefit Preservica customers but the community as a whole. Providing this advice to all users immediately will mean they can use the best migration tools as soon as the advice is published.”

Matthew Addis, Founder and CTO, Arkivum “This is a great leap forward in increasing the interoperability and transparency of today’s preservation systems. By providing a way for the community to document and share preservation actions, organisations will be able to execute digital preservation in a consistent and trusted way using their preservation systems of choice.”

Justin Simpson, Director of Archivematica Technical Services, Artefactual “PAR has the potential to become an important piece of digital preservation infrastructure. It is very exciting, not just for the technical capabilities PAR promises to deliver, but more importantly for offering a systematic approach to technical collaboration that transcends the traditional boundaries of a single company or project.”

Martin Wrigley, Executive Director of the Open Preservation Foundation “The OPF is delighted to be at the centre of innovation in digital preservation and is very excited about playing a pivotal role in making this critical information publicly available.”

John Kaye, Jisc “PAR will initially make the Research Data Shared Service even more powerful for Jisc users. However, we hope that in time it proves to be the cornerstone of a new age in digital preservation collaboration that will help everyone that needs to retain information for a long time.”

Future project announcements will be posted on www.parcore.org. Arkivum, Artefactual, Preservica and Jisc will also be presenting the combined paper on the PAR project at this year’s iPres Conference in Boston 24-27 September – full text here http://doi.org/cq9p

About

Arkivum is the trusted software and service partner for long-term data lifecycle management and digital preservation. We serve organisations around the world in data-intensive, regulated markets. Arkivum provides an end-to-end, managed service to deal with the complexity of preserving your data securely for the long-term, while guaranteeing 100% data integrity and immediate access to your data so you can bring your archived data to life.

Contact: Rebecca Hicks, Head of Marketing becks.hicks@arkivum.com

Artefactual Systems’ archivists, librarians and developers are passionate about open-source and standards-based systems. Artefactual provides and supports several Archivematica and AtoM releases a year and delivers hosting and technical services to a growing list of clients world-wide.

Contact: Evelyn McLellan, President, evelyn@artefactual.com, tel: +11.604.527.2056

Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company whose role is to support post-16 and higher education, and research, by providing relevant and useful advice, digital resources and network and technology services, while researching and developing new technologies and ways of working. It is funded by a combination of the UK further and higher education funding bodies, and individual higher education institutions.

Contact: JISC press office, press@jisc.ac.uk , tel: +44 (0)203 006 6056

The Open Preservation Foundation is a global not-for-profit membership organisation that leads a collaborative effort to create, maintain and develop the reference set of sustainable, open source digital preservation tools. Founded in 2010 as the Open Planets Foundation to steward the results of EU-funded R&D, the Foundation enables the development of best practice through interest groups, community events and training. Our vision is open sustainable digital preservation.

Contact: Open Preservation Foundation, info@openpreservation.org, +44(0)1937 546013

Preservica is changing the way organisations around the world protect and future-proof critical long-term digital information. Available in the cloud (SaaS) or on-premise, our award-winning active digital preservation software has been designed from the ground-up to tackle the unique challenges of ensuring digital information remains accessible and trustworthy over decades.

Press contact: Edward Clark, eclark@thecommsco.com or tel: +44 (0)7983 507659