How trustworthy is the SCAPE Preservation Environment?
Over the last three and a half years, the SCAPE project worked in several directions in order to propose new solutions for digital preservation, as well as improving existing ones. One of the results of this work is the SCAPE preservation environment (SPE). It is a loosely coupled system, which enables extending existing digital repository systems (e.g. RODA) with several components that cover collection profiling (i.e. C3PO), preservation monitoring (i.e. SCOUT) and preservation planning (i.e. Plato). Those components address key functionalities defined in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) functional model.
Establishing trustworthiness of digital repositories is a major concern of the digital preservation community as it makes the threats and risks within a digital repository understandable. There are several approaches developed over recent years on how to address trust in digital repositories. The most notable is Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC), which has later been promoted to an ISO standard by the International Standards Organization (ISO 16363, released in 2012). The standard comprises of three pillars: organizational infrastructure, digital object management, and infrastructure and security management and for each of these it provides a set of requirements and the expected evidence needed for compliance.
A recently published whitepaper reports on the work done to validate the SCAPE Preservation Environment against the ISO 16363 – a framework for Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories. The work aims to demonstrate that a preservation ecosystem composed of building blocks as the ones developed in SCAPE is able to comply with most of the system-related requirements of the ISO 16363.
From a total of 108 metrics included in the assessment, the SPE fully supports 69 of them. 31 metrics were considered to be “out of scope” as they refer to organisational issues that cannot be solved by technology alone nor can they be analysed outside the framework of a breathing organisation, leaving 2 metrics to be considered “partially supported” and 6 metrics to be considered “not supported”. This gives an overall compliancy level of roughly 90% (if the organisational oriented metrics are not taken into account).
This work also enabled us to identify the main weak points of the SCAPE Preservation Environment that should be addressed in the near future. In summary the gaps found were:
- The ability to manage and maintain contracts or deposit agreements through the repository user interfaces;
- Support for tracking intellectual property rights;
- Improve technical documentation, especially on the conversion of Submission Information Packages (SIP) into Archival Information Packages (AIP);
- The ability to aid the repository manager to perform better risk management.
Our goal is to ensure that the SCAPE Preservation Environment fully supports the system-related metrics of the ISO 16363. In order to close the gaps encountered, additional features have been added to the roadmap of the SPE.
To get your hands on the full report, please go to http://www.scape-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/SCAPE_MS63_KEEPS-V1.0.pdf