I believed it was important to experiment with the Preservica digital repository system as it is a specialist cloud provider widely used in the cultural sector. If you are not aware of it, you can read more about it here and see case studies here.
Firstly, I acknowledge that this is an expensive commercial solution only suitable for institutions or companies and it’s not an option for the project at hand.[1] Since the system is available to UCL students in a demo version, I wanted to understand better how it works, what it can offer, and more specifically the ingest function.
♦ Refresher
Regarding ingesting, you can see my intro and specifically this. To summarise the process so far, the preparation for long-term storage involves actions such as assigning a persistent identifier; checking that there are no viruses or other malicious spyware or malware, extracting, creating and adding metadata, creating fixity values to assist with establishing integrity, uncompressing or unencrypting the data or digital object if necessary, and combining the data or digital object and their description and representation information into an AIP (Archival Information Package).
Preservica can do all that and can be synchronised with collection management software like CALM, Adlib and ArchivesSpace. It generates reports on ingest, file formats, access, GDPR data on stored files and storage for any given time-frame. It can also run automatic workflows for direct ingestion.
I ingested my 4 files into the system. I had detailed instructions provided by my module’s lecturer and the process was quite straightforward. See below the documentation I produced: metadata, ingest report, detailed ingest report and file format report.
Without wanting this to sound like an advertisement for a commercial company, Preservica does offer a holistic approach to preservation, metadata and documentation. I can see the appeal, especially for institutions with complex structures and large data quantities, of having a single robust solution in place.
It can prove cost effective in cases where there is limited in-house IT support and risk management cannot allow for more open source approaches that rely on the adaptability and retraining of digital archivists and curators.
But there are certain issues we need to be aware of!
On a second glance, the implementation of Preservica is not so straight forward, or out-of-the-box, as it might appear. It still requires a long process of planning, possible customisation and working closely with IT to connect to management and user interfaces.
Integration with other data and collection management systems can be complicated. Additionally, this solution seems not to be suitable for visual and audio-visual collections but better equipped for textual records. See for example this blog post by Elizabeth Thurlow Digital Archives & Collections Implementation Manager at the University of the Arts London on the lengthy process of implementing Preservica.
That said, there are plenty of open source tools available as well as all-encompassing open source solutions like ArchivesSpace and Archivematica. For example, Archivematica seems a quite comprehensive web based, open source system of digital preservation. Since, it requires Linux and does not support Windows I was not able to try it. From some preliminary research I did online, the Archivematica solution offers a microservices system which operates on a conceptual entity that is similar to the standard OAIS information package.
[1] “Guidance on Cloud Storage and Digital Preservation Second Edition,” March 2015, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/Preserving-Digital-CloudStorage-Guidance_March-2015.pdf.