Ask: Preservation Tools Panel Session

Feb 16, 2011 by kirsty-pitkin

This panel session discussed the Open Planets Foundation challenge in more detail, and then opened up into a more in depth discussion about repositories and the development of preservation tools.

Members of the audience included developers working with repositories, who shared their experiences with the panel. One of the issues they raised was the underlying purpose of these repositories – which was often more to do with exposure of data rather than preservation. The experts on the panel observed that if the developers within such repositories can make the data interoperable between the number of existing systems, they will have already done much of the work needed for preservation. They also emphasised the need for a set of shared practices across the sector that support the developer to think the right way, not the easy way.

There were also questions about the technologies required for ensuring the integrity of migrated information. The experts observed that what is “adequate migration” is very difficult to define definitively. They also described tools, such as the Plato tool, which helps to build a list of required data characteristics and then perform a migration using a variety of tools, then offers a score to judge the success of these migrations.

The discussion moved to how researchers can maximise the value of their output by considering how to make their data accessible in the future, which in many cases would involve a small amount of extra effort to document the data usefully. They also emphasised the fundamental issue of assigning a persistent identifier for their data and the need not just for tools, but the need for smarter decisions about the data to ensure the provenance of the research data.