Assessing digital preservation frameworks : the approach of the SHAMAN project

How can we deliver infrastructure capable of supporting the preservation of digital objects, as well as the services that can be applied to those digital objects, in ways that future unknown systems will understand? A critical problem in developing systems is the process of validating whether the delivered solution effectively reflects the validated requirements. This is a challenge also for the EU-funded SHAMAN project, which aims to develop an integrated preservation framework using grid-technologies for distributed networks of digital preservation systems, for managing the storage, access, presentation, and manipulation of digital objects over time. Recognising this, the project team ensured that alongside the user requirements an assessment framework was developed. This paper presents the assessment of the SHAMAN demonstrators for the memory institution, industrial design and engineering and eScience domains, from the point of view of user’s needs and fitness for purpose. An innovative synergistic use of TRAC criteria, DRAMBORA risk registry and mitigation strategies, iRODS rules and information system models requirements has been designed, with the underlying goal to define associated policies, rules and state information, and make them wherever possible machine-encodable and enforceable. The described assessment framework can be valuable not only for the implementers of this project preservation framework, but for the wider digital preservation community, because it provides a holistic approach to assessing and validating the preservation of digital libraries, digital repositories and data centres