Preservation Planning with Plato

Planets tutorial in connection with ECDL 2008

14 September 2008, Aarhus, Denmark

Introduction

The fast changes of technologies in today�s information landscape have considerably shortened the lifespan of digital objects. Digital preservation has become a pressing challenge. A lot of different strategies, i.e. preservation actions, have been proposed to tackle this challenge: migration and emulation are the most prominent ones. However, even the decision to either go for migration or emulation is quite hard, and it gets more complex when it comes to pick a certain migration tool for instance. The process of evaluating potential solutions against specific requirements and building a plan for preserving a given set of objects is called preservation planning which presently is a mainly manual process with little tool support.

In this tutorial attendees will create a preservation plan on the basis of a representative scenario and receive an accountable and informed recommendation for a particular preservation action. The whole preservation planning process will be supported by Plato, a decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning approach and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.

Benefits of attendance

• Understanding of the various aspects of preservation planning
• Awareness of the range of services and tools Planets will be delivering
• Knowledge of the 'utility analysis' methodology and practical skills in building objective trees for different types of digital objects
• Hands-on experience with Plato, a Planets preservation planning tool

Target Audience

The target audience for this tutorial comprises people who are aware of or actively concerned with long-term preservation issues. People intending to ensure the accessibility of their private photo collection for their offspring belong to this group as well as librarians and archivists with a mandate to long-time preserve the institution's digital objects.

Learning Objectives

Attendees shall learn how to build a preservation plan from scratch by undergoing all steps required to arrive at a well-informed recommendation for a solution to adopt. The main objectives will be to recognise the importance of becoming clear about the institution�s inert requirements, evaluating possible preservation strategies and analysing them.

Duration

The tutorial will be a full day event.

Biographies of the presenters

Andreas Rauber is Associate Professor at the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology. He is actively involved in several research projects in the field of Digital Libraries, focusing on the organization and exploration of large information spaces, as well as Web archiving and digital preservation. His research interests cover the broad scope of digital libraries, including specifically text and music information retrieval and organization, information visualization, as well as data analysis and neural computation.

Hannes Kulovits is currently a PhD researcher at the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology. He received his Master in Business Informatics from the Vienna University of Technology in 2005. He is actively involved in several research projects in the field of Digital Preservation where his main focus lies in Preservation Planning and Recommender Systems.

Language

The event will be conducted in English.

Information and registration

For more information on the tutorial please contact tutorials@ecdl2008.org.

To registrate for the tutorial please visit www.ecdl2008.org/registration