Digital Preservation Coalition

CeRch

Excerpt from DPC Annual Report 2008-2009

Applied research is central to the operation of the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King’s College London, informing the development of its teaching programme and other services. The centre successfully completed a number of preservation projects in 2009.

InSPECT (http://www.significantproperties.org.uk) addressed the challenge of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of digital objects across changing technical environments. CeRch worked with The National Archives to develop a methodological framework for the identification, analysis and description of significant properties. It went on to determine the property sets of four object types – audio recordings, raster images, presentational markup and e-mails – that may, in specific scenarios, be considered significant.

SOAPI (http://kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/projects/completed/soapi.html) produced an technical architecture for (partially) automating key tasks when ingesting digital objects into a digital repository. The architecture is composed of a set of atomic web services that each performs an activity, such as format characterisation, conversion and metadata generation.

SHERPA DP2 (http://www.sherpadp.org.uk) developed a data management strategy in which the roles and responsibilities for curation and preservation are performed by a third-party that is separate from those that create/publish research. The project worked with several institutions to demonstrate the provision of preservation functionality for content distributed via digital repositories, web sites and other systems.

More recently, CeRch received funding for several additional projects. Several of these consider themes associated with the curation and preservation of research data that exists within the institution.

PEKin (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/projects/portfolio/pekin.html) is a collaboration between CeRch and the KCL Archives division to implement a service to manage electronic business records and research materials in an HE institution. The project is working with central services to implement a consistent preservation strategy and service; and liaising with academic units to ensure local data producers and systems managers are provided with targeted advice, guidance and tools to support decision-making.

BRIL (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/projects/portfolio/bril.html) aims to embed the digital repository within the researchers’ day-to-day research and experimental practices. By working with researchers in the KCL Randall institute, the repository will capture and curate the ongoing process of the experiment workflow.

SPIL (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/cerch/projects/portfolio/spil.html) builds upon the InSPECT methodology to identify significant properties of value to these researchers and will be producing services to extract and validate properties using automated tools.

Finally, CeRch is working with the University of Hull on the CLIF project (http://www.hull.ac.uk/clif/) to examine lifecycle management of digital research across system boundaries. To achieve its objectives, the project is integrating the Fedora digital repository with Microsoft Office