Adding quality-awareness to evaluate migration web-services and remote emulation for digital preservation

Abstract. Digital libraries are increasingly relying on distributed ser-vices to support increasingly complex tasks such as retrieval or preserva-tion.While there is a growing body of services for migrating digital objects into safer formats to ensure their long-term accessability, the quality of these services is often unknown. Moreover, emulation as the major alter-native preservation strategy is often neglected due to the complex setup procedures that are necessary for testing emulation. However, thorough evaluation of the complete set of potential strategies in a quantified and repeatable way is considered of vital importance for trustworthy decision making in digital preservation planning. This paper presents a preservation action monitoring infrastructure that combines provider-side service instrumentation and quality mea-surement of migration web services with remote access to emulation. Tools are monitored during execution, and both their runtime charac-teristics and the quality of their results are measured transparently. We present the architecture of the presented framework and discuss results from experiments on migration and emulation services.