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It is hardly surprising that many of you are experiencing tools and standards fatigue: a sense of confusion about what tools and standards exist, how they apply, how their costs and benefits stack up, and how they relate. Most studies of what tools and standards exist often leave you unsure of how to proceed. For their part, many tools and standards are poorly linked, inconsistently used, and not always clear about their intended application. This is where we, the DCC, come in. Through our Helpdesk and Advisory Service we are committed to providing you with the best advice about what tools and standards are available and how to use them.
A catalogue of digital curation tools and technical information is available. We continually evaluate resources developed by others through our testbed facilities, and we encourage you to share your experiences of your own practical digital curation processes with us. As well as contributing to our testbed activity, this will enable us to document how specific institutions deal with digital curation challenges.
Our overall aim is to develop robust services, as well as to provide you with tools to automate important digital preservation processes such as ingest, metadata creation, storage, and access for re-using digital objects.
Testbeds provide a controlled environment where hypotheses can be scientifically tested and evaluated, and where experiment results can be empirically compared. We are utilising the Planets Testbed [external] in order to test curation and preservation tools and strategies. To facilitate the experimentation process, we have developed a Methodology for Designing and Evaluating Curation and Preservation Experiments [PDF, 147KB] which serves as a workflow framework for designing experiments to validate the effectiveness of curation and preservation strategies.
We believe that curation activities cannot be evaluated independently of context. To truly understand the usefulness of different preservation tools and approaches we must therefore consider them within specific use cases or frames of reference where user needs and disciplinary requirements have been clearly indicated and have been used to inform the evaluation process and metrics for success.
The following documents are available to assist you with the experimentation process:
The KRYS I Corpus [external] for metadata extraction and genre classification research was jointly developed by ourselves and HATII at the University of Glasgow. The corpus consists of over 6000 documents and is expected to become a major research resource among text processing and data and information management researchers. In particular, we encourage the use of the corpus for the research of:
The key to ensuring that digital curation services are based on sound and tested practice is understanding relevant standards and their development. We are committed to providing a standards watch that will play a vital role in the testing and certification of new tools and trusted digital repositories.
The value of many of our digital assets, whether expressed in financial, scientific, scholarly, legal, cultural or simply sentimental terms cannot be underestimated. Notwithstanding their informational value, the digital form lends many exclusive advantages, such as increased accessibility, greater opportunities for performing rigorous analysis and more potential for reuse. However, digital materials also exhibit vulnerabilities on a greater scale than in the analogue world. Authenticity, integrity and understandability of digital materials are all at threat both in the contemporary, across diverse communities and systems, and over time, with few guarantees available about the way that the information landscape will exist in even a few years time.
Efforts to limit threats to digital object authenticity, integrity and understandability are constantly being developed. Digital repositories are considered by many to be one viable solution to such threats, and are being increasingly relied upon to assume stewardship responsibilities for a wide range of digital materials. Defined more broadly than in strict technological terms, these repositories encompass their associated systems, policies, procedures and people and must be considered in terms of the organisational, financial, legal and technological contexts within which digital content is collected, managed and utilised. However, within what remains an immature discipline, there have been few available assurances of the success or appropriateness of repositories' adopted approaches, and little evidence of any common notion of what success for digital repositories actually means. The fundamental question is often expressed in terms of trustworthiness — which of the repositories claiming to offer information preservation or curation services can actually be trusted to do so? Information creators, curators and users, as well as funding bodies and other external agencies each have a vested interest in determining the answer to this question.
We have been heavily involved in a number of international efforts to conceive methods and metrics to support the audit of digital holdings and ultimately the certification of digital repositories.
Development References [external]
Date Published: 31 May 2005 | Last Modified: 13 October 2009 | Submit Feedback | web-editor@dcc.ac.uk
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