Long-term Preservation as a Relay Greg Janée University of California at Santa Barbara

NDIIPP partners meeting Typical preservation effort recent content now take action now years

NDIIPP partners meeting Ein Gedankenexperiment old content now - 50now + 50now take action content ancient content “mid-century perspective”

NDIIPP partners meeting Mid-century perspective Repeated migrations across storage media and storage systems –past and future Repeated migrations across archive systems –each possibly necessitating transformation and reorganization of archived content Repeated handoffs between institutions –each implementing different policies

NDIIPP partners meeting Time T 0 Archival objects over time usable unusable

NDIIPP partners meeting increasing obsolescence T years

NDIIPP partners meeting total obsolescence T years

NDIIPP partners meeting new derivative T years

NDIIPP partners meeting repeated obsolescence T years

NDIIPP partners meeting repeated migration T years

NDIIPP partners meeting T years

NDIIPP partners meeting Information value, resource availability vary over time Need Shirky’s “option to do nothing” Need a representation of archival objects that is ultra-low-cost, resurrectable Equivalent of cardboard box in the basement Mummification archive handoff mummified form embalm resurrect

NDIIPP partners meeting Questions How can we facilitate handoffs? How can we facilitate mummification? –particularly in cases of archive failure? How can we make resurrection possible? –will always be hard archive handoff mummified form embalm resurrect

NDIIPP partners meeting Handoff architecture archive OAIS exportingest archive logical data model physical data model storage virtualization layer logical data model physical data model interop best practices

NDIIPP partners meeting Logical data model must capture all information required to resurrect, reuse objects Must include archival of format specs, metadata, contextual information, transitive closure of dependencies Handoff architecture archive logical data model physical data model storage virtualization layer OAIS interop best practices

NDIIPP partners meeting Physical data model must fully and simply represent logical data model No vendor lock-in Suggestion: files, filesystems, manifests Handoff architecture archive logical data model physical data model storage virtualization layer OAIS interop best practices

NDIIPP partners meeting Storage virtualization layer supports intra- and inter-archive handoffs Handoff architecture archive logical data model physical data model storage virtualization layer OAIS interop best practices

NDIIPP partners meeting Combination of complete resurrection information with a simple physical representation means… Mummification is a NO-OP Handoff architecture archive logical data model physical data model storage virtualization layer OAIS interop best practices

NDIIPP partners meeting Format registries Archives reference registries Registries must capture, archive format specifications Must represent formats as archival objects Offer transitive extraction service archive format registry reference extract

NDIIPP partners meeting Discussion topics Characterization of ingest vs. handoff Filesystem-like representation for mummification? Standardization of logical, physical data models possible?