Planning and managing the 'cost of compromise' for AV retention and access

Long term retention and access to AV assets as part of a preservation strategy inevitably involves some form of compromise in order to achieve acceptable levels of cost, throughput, quality and many other parameters. Examples include: quality control and throughput in media transfer chains; data safety and accessibility in digital storage systems; and service levels for ingest and access for archive functions delivered as services. We present new software tools and frameworks developed in the PrestoPRIME project that allow these compromises to be quantitatively assessed, planned and managed for file-based AV assets. Our focus is how to give an archive an assurance that when they design and operate a preservation strategy as a set of services that it will function as expected and can cope with the inevitable and often unpredictable variations that will happen in operation. This includes being able to do cost projections, sensitivity analysis, simulation of 'disaster scenarios’, and to govern preservation services using Service Level Agreements and policies