Whitepaper

Harvard Digital Preservation Format Assessments

By: AVP
October 12, 2017

Harvard Library collections include:

  • a variety of computer media that will be imaged using forensic disk imaging techniques,
  • image sequences, a format used primarily in motion picture film scanning, and
  • video assets in a variety of formats.

These materials will be preserved in the Library’s preservation and access repository – the Digital Repository Service (DRS). As a first step towards providing support for this material in the DRS, the Library engaged AVPreserve in late 2015 to assist with the analysis. The goals of the analysis were:

  • Recommended formats to accept and prefer for the DRS
  • Recommended technical metadata schema(s) to use for these formats
  • DRS content models for these objects
  • Recommendations for enhancing Harvard Library’s FITS tool to better support these objects

The driving principles of this work were to:

  • Provide interoperability with the existing metadata schemas and workflows of the DRS
  • Provide sufficient metadata for long-term preservation of these objects
  • Adhere to existing standards where possible
  • Propose simpler models over more complex ones where possible

Specifically the analysis was conducted in three areas: formats, metadata and tools. See assessment results on the Harvard Wiki page: