How to choose a digital preservation strategy

• DOI: 10.1145/1255175.1255181
• Publication Date: 2007-09-14T16:07:37Z
• Authors: Stephan Strodl; Christoph Becker; Robert Neumayer; Andreas Rauber
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 11. Sustainability; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; 0509 other social sciences

An increasing number of institutions throughout the world face legal obligations or business needs to collect and preserve digital objects over several decades. A range of tools exists today to support the variety of preservation strategies such as migration or emulation. Yet, different preservation requirements across institutions and settings make the decision on which solution to implement very diffcult.This paper presents the PLANETS Preservation Planning approach. It provides an approved way to make informed and accountable decisions on which solution to implement in order to optimally preserve digital objects for a given purpose. It is based on Utility Analysis to evaluate the performance of various solutions against well-defined requirements and goals. The viability of this approach is shown in a range of case studies for different settings. We present its application to two scenarios of web archives, two collections of electronic publications, and a collection of multimedia art. This work focuses on the different requirements and goals in the various preservation settings.