Facilitate interoperability across preservation infrastructures

From GRDI2020

This is a GRDI recommendation; return to Main Page with all the challenges and recommendations This recommendation is cited by Data Curation and Preservation.

Context and Challenges

Numerous archives (e.g. institutional, discipline, national) are emerging, each facing similar preservation challenges. Even if the landscape stabilises over time, the creation and disbanding of archives can always be expected.

However, preservation cannot be tackled by individual archives alone (consider the efforts to be invested in format registries and associated services. Cf. <ref>Abrams, Seaman: Towards a Global Digital Format Registry. In: 69th IFLA General Conference and Council. 1-9 August 2003, Berlin.</ref>) Interoperability between data formats, services, and registries needs to be ensured to ensure interaction in the preservation community. Hosting and maintaining these standards and services in an open, reliable, and sustainable way is an essential task for a global data infrastructure.

Various preservation initiatives working on generic archive software and preservation infrastructure, as cited above (cf. Data Curation and Preservation). However, these efforts often lack interoperability.

Recommendation

Facilitate interoperability across preservation infrastructures, both with respect to data and with respect to preservation services.

• With regard to data, it should be possible to extract digital objects from one repository and transfer them to another repository environment without breaking the preservation chain. This involves retaining preservation metadata and provenance (cf. the PREMIS preservation metadata standard).
• With regard to services, gateways should enable the application of, for example, metadata validation or format conversion services in distinct archive environments.
• Registries should be versatile enough to be embedded in various archive environments and to evolve with the technological environment around them.

Stakeholders

The cultural heritage community has invested extensively in designing many of these generic preservation formats, services and registries. The cultural heritage community, computer scientists and data centers need to collaborate in order to ensure that these these products are being linked into global data infrastructures, opened for other communities and (perhaps) re-engineered to ensure their technical availability and scalability.

Service interoperability remains an issue as technology cycles outpace standards development. Interoperability between command-line tools like the UC3 curation microservices, the OSGI-based DuraCloud, and SOAP/WSDL-based preservation services by Planets is a challenge, this also illustrates that complete interoperability will probably never be attainable. But the preservation community must attain gateways between them, a data infrastructure that can accommodate technological change, and an overarching discussion to moderate between them. This includes technological as well as organisational tasks and will take time to achieve, as does any community process.