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Introducing Curate Sharepoint: experience best-practice digital preservation integrated directly into Microsoft Sharepoint for the first time.

Tue, 28 May 2024 15:07:08 GMT

We are ecstatic to be able to announce Curate Sharepoint, the first seamless and flexible way to connect your Microsoft Sharepoint environment with a best-practice, OAIS-conformant digital preservation platform. By efficiently preserving your born-digital records directly from Sharepoint, your organisation will be able to say goodbye to pre-ingest anxiety once and for all.

Key Features:

One-click, a hundred actions. 10x your preservation velocity.

With just one click, Curate Sharepoint allows you to perform a complete preservation workflow, reducing the time and effort it takes to safeguard your files and enabling you to preserve your risky content right now . Watch your pre-ingest backlog melt away before your eyes.

Seamless integration, it's right there, and it just works.

Curate Sharepoint connects totally seamlessly with your existing Sharepoint experience, adapting automatically to your organisations theme, colour-schemes and permissions.

Customisable Preservation Workflows:

Choose between a turn-key preservation service for fully automated archiving, or take complete control over your preservation workflow, it's up to you.
One-click "Preserve" button in Sharepoint to automatically stream content to Curate for processing, storage, and preservation
Create and switch between multiple customised workflows to meet your organisation's specific requirements.

Instantly Safeguard your Born-Digital Files at Risk:

Content streamed to Curate is automatically virus checked, integrity checked, and is immediately stored in archival-grade, triple geo-replicated storage, allowing you to instantly safeguard files at risk.

Flexible Deployment Options:

Curate's Sharepoint integration accommodates a full spectrum of preservation needs, from fully automated to highly customised manual workflows:

Automated workflows preserve content into best-practice Archival Information Packages (AIPs), with connections to glacial and LTO storage. Just click "Preserve".
Manual workflows give you total control to appraise, arrange, and preserve content with confidence.

Independent and Vendor-Neutral:

Developed and offered completely independently of Microsoft, Curate Sharepoint provides a truly vendor-neutral solution with all the benefits of a native Sharepoint feature, and for the first time enables organisations just like yours to connect their document libraries to a truly OAIS-conformant, best-practice preservation system.

Benefits of Curate Sharepoint:

Streamlined Workflows: Reduce friction and fragmentation in your archival workflow, increasing productivity and saving time.
Enhanced Security: Benefit from efficient and secure data movement, ensuring your content's safety and integrity.
Faster Preservation: Minimise the time it takes to safeguard your risky content with automated processing and archival-grade storage.
Increased Automation and Control: Tailor Curate Sharepoint to your needs with customisable workflows and granular control options
Optimised Costs and Storage: Reduce Sharepoint clutter and optimise repository costs by efficiently managing your content lifecycle.

Choose Curate as your comprehensive digital archiving solution to future-proof your digital assets and ensure their long-term usability, accessibility, and authenticity.

Get in touch with us today to discuss your archiving challenges and to discover more about how Curate could save you and your organisation time, money and energy.

Microsoft, Sharepoint, and Microsoft 365 are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

The Curate Sharepoint integration is an independent product developed by Penwern Limited and facilitated by the Sharepoint-framework (SPFx), another trademark or registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. Neither Curate, the Curate Sharepoint integration, or Penwern Limited are affiliated with, endorsed, supported or sponsored by the Microsoft Corporation or its partners.

Born-analogue: how digitisation is still a major barrier to digital preservation efforts.

Tue, 16 May 2023 10:05:50 GMT

Despite the rapid growth in the volume of born-digital objects, born-analogue content is still a crucial part of many collections. Digitisation is a fundamental process that all digitally preserved born-analogue objects go through and, as many can attest, it’s not without its pitfalls. The digitisation process can be a significant barrier to preserving born-analogue content, and has greater implications on maintaining the accuracy and authenticity of digital objects.

Careful Planning Can Help Negate The Cost Of Digitisation

The process of digitisation can be a lengthy and expensive exercise. Digitising collections requires significant resources, including specialised equipment, trained personnel, and time. In some cases, digitisation can take years to complete, making it an impractical undertaking for many organisations. Introducing these additional tasks into the preservation workflow when compared to born-digital content significantly increases the time invested into each artefact, reducing the throughput the archivist can achieve between their pre-accession collections and the digital archive itself. Also, not only does the archivist need to select scanning apparatus that meets their quality requirements, but they also have to be mindful of the ongoing challenges associated with retaining their digitised records. Higher quality scans could consume more storage space, for example. The choice of formats and characteristics of the digitisation systems can also have drastic effects on the costs of a digitisation project. Specifically selecting a scanning system that produces outputs in a format suitable for preservation can negate the need for additional format migration, reducing processing and storage requirements. Careful planning like this can help reduce the cost, duration, complexity, and environmental impact of your digitisation project.

They'll Never Be Perfect

Organisations who are able to sustain a digitisation programme will often be limited by time or cost in the number of attempts they have to capture each artefact. This means that the operator performing the digitisation may be compelled to accept imperfect scans so as to not exceed their constraints. This means that the accuracy and authenticity of the digital object can be permanently and irreversibly affected by a sub-optimal scan. In some cases, a bad scan may even omit important information from the original analogue object. For example, if a manuscript is poorly scanned, it may be difficult to read or even illegible. Unlike born-digital content, born-analogue digital objects are also implicitly derivatives of their original source. Regardless of whether a particular scan is done well, or even perfectly, the digital object can only be engaged with thereafter through the additional context of the digitisation process. The practical effects of this could be minimal, an idiosyncratic blue cast to scans produced by a particular scanning system may not affect how we interpret or interact with, say, a digitised newspaper article, but there is most certainly potential for more drastic effects, and this is still an important concept for us to at least be aware of. Even outside of the scope of the digitisation hardware itself, there are still properties or nuances of the original object that are bound to be lost. The digital copy of the object may not capture features like texture or reflectivity, which can result in a loss of information. In the case of features that are enabled or precipitated by movement, like a complex texture that responds to the angle of light cast on it, will be impossible to capture without employing a more specific strategy tailored to that object (in our example, a combination of pictures and videos could be used). In any case, it is crucial to ensure that digitisation is performed carefully and with the appropriate equipment and expertise to minimise the risk of damage to the original analogue object, and the loss of any significant properties in the digital object.

More at stake

The physical process of digitising an analogue object can also pose several risks that could damage or even destroy the original object. Some materials, such as fragile manuscripts, photographs, or older analogue audio formats are particularly susceptible to damage from excessive handling, pressure, or exposure to light. These risks are typically accounted for by an organisation used to handling physical artefacts, but could be a unique challenge for others. Digitising an object often means it will necessarily be subjected to some handling and exposure, and It's imperative when planning a digitisation strategy to account for the sensitivity of the analogue objects and ensure your selection of tools and processes minimises any risks to them. It can be valuable for organisations to invest in training and minimally viable tools or facilities to handle a small physical collection, even if they do not typically handle physical artefacts. This can drastically improve the efficacy and safety of your digitisation capabilities, and make your archive a significantly more valuable prospect for potential depositors.

Old Rights Die Hard

Orphan works, which are defined as works whose copyright owner cannot be identified or located, are a particularly acute challenge when it comes to born-analogue content. Born-analogue content has a tendency, particularly in a cultural heritage context, to be older than born-digital objects. The age of these items, coupled with changes in copyright law and the frequent absence of clear provenance information, means that it can be exceptionally difficult to determine ownership and copyright status. Consequently, born-analogue collections are often more likely to include orphan works. The challenge posed by orphan works in born-analogue content is significant. Institutions seeking to make their analogue collections available digitally must ensure that they do not infringe on copyright by making orphan works available online without permission from the copyright holder. Locating and obtaining permission from copyright holders can be an extremely challenging task, particularly given the high volume of orphan works in analogue collections and the difficulties associated with identifying copyright holders. These challenges are compounded by the cost and effort required to conduct exhaustive searches for copyright owners, which can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

Despite the increasing volume of born-digital material that needs to be preserved, born-analogue content still makes up a significant portion of digital collections. The process of digitisation can be lengthy, expensive, and the accuracy and authenticity of the digital object, and the analogue original, can't always be guaranteed. Addressing these challenges requires organisations to invest in the resources and expertise needed to ensure that born-analogue content can accurately and precisely captured to be preserved, while minimising the costs and risks.

Curate Mini-Tip: Prevent Duplicate Object Uploads Like A Pro

Tue, 09 May 2023 12:39:51 GMT

Duplicate De-ja-vu

Curate is the only Digital Curation platform that gives you total control over your pre-transfer collections and lets you customise how the system responds to duplicate uploads. Simply click open the advanced options menu using the ⋮ icon in the transfer window to select your preferences.

The "Stop upload and alert me" option allows you to take discretionary action whenever a duplicate finds its way in to your pre-transfer collections, so you never again have to worry about your digital preservation system making modifications to your artefacts without your knowledge.

Click the demo button below to test out Curate right now, no details or signup of any kind, and keep an eye out for future mini-tips where you can discover more thoughtful features that make Curate the most effective Digital Curation platform available.

The Open Secret Of Reliable Digital Preservation Strategies

Thu, 04 May 2023 08:23:03 GMT

The role of open source software in digital preservation: An examination of how open source principles guide digital preservation guidelines, it's benefits and drawbacks.

Open-source software has always been a key resource in digital preservation efforts. The flexibility, public accessibility (allowing users to modify and/or audit it as needed) and often low-cost of open-source software make it an appealing choice for digital archivists not only for its resource efficiency, but because it can also directly increase the chance a digital collection has to survive for extended periods of time. Open-source software can provide more control over the digital preservation process, enabling users to make more specific choices in their selection of tools to better preserve their collections. Let’s explore how open-source principles guide and are reflected in digital preservation guidelines and examine the benefits and drawbacks of using open-source software in your digital preservation system.

Open Principles

Parallels between open-source principles and concepts that play an important role in guiding digital preservation practice are easy to identify. Providing a framework for collaboration, transparency, and community involvement in both cases increases the efficacy and veracity of their outputs. These principles align well with the goals of digital preservation, which seek to ensure the long-term availability and accessibility of digital information, by encouraging development that can be used and audited by anyone. Open-source principles emphasise transparency, meaning that the source code for the software is publicly accessible and can be scrutinised, modified, and improved by anyone. In a digital preservation context, this transparency enables organisations to have a far deeper understanding of the processes they subject their data to, more control over their digital preservation strategies, to trust their systems more, and to make necessary decisions as technology evolves. This reciprocally improves the custodian organisations understanding of their collections, empowering them to describe and treat future content even more effectively.

The collaborative nature of open-source is also a natural fit for digital preservation: a community of users who share knowledge, expertise, and resources to improve and enhance tools have the capacity to maintain stable software for longer than ephemeral private vendors. Digital preservation also naturally requires multi-disciplinary efforts, not only in the development of guidelines, strategies, and tools, but also in the physical implementation, ongoing usage and maintenance of these systems and practices; frequently requiring the involvement of IT professionals, librarians, archivists, and other highly specialised stakeholders.

Open-source software offers an appealing alternative to the typical approach of proprietary solutions, which often attempt to aggregate many functions into monolithic services to reduce complexity, but in turn can reduce or eliminate the control an archivist has over their collections. In some cases, this can be to the extent that the archivist cannot be reasonably said to be taking true responsibility as the incumbent custodian of their content. They have de facto ceded the decision-making process of how their collections are treated to the vendor. This is not only counter-intuitive to the principles most digital-preservation authorities espouse: assumption of accountability, custodianship, and responsibility for the preservation of their collections on the part of the archivist, it is also dangerous for the collections. The authority on how, when, and why any actions are taken on content should always fundamentally be the archivist in charge of the collections. Any bespoke processes or protected methodologies implemented by proprietary software naturally reduce the precision and quality of the custodians understanding of their own collections. Regardless of their documentation or escrow arrangements, the users will never be able to understand a proprietary solution as closely at the lowest levels as an open one.

Open Software, Open Risks

Despite its benefits, open-source software and open principals naturally imply some disbenefits. One potentially significant drawback of using open-source software in digital preservation is the lack of dedicated support and potential challenges in maintenance. Because open-source software is often developed by volunteers or small organisations, there may not be dedicated support staff available to assist with technical issues or updates. This is a stark contradiction to one of its greatest strengths, the capacity for open-source to endure for longer than proprietary, but the expectation in general software for proprietary to be better resourced than open-source does not necessarily follow in a digital preservation context. Digital preservation is still in IT terms a relatively small market and one that requires highly specific resources to enter. This generally makes digital preservation a less appealing segment for major software vendors, so any totally proprietary software developers tend to be relatively small and not have any significant resource advantage over their open competitors.

This is also linked to the true cost of using an open solution for digital preservation, or any other complex task: open does not mean free (or even cheap). The saving made not directly paying for the development of the software is frequently nullified by the additional cost of a support or maintenance agreement, which are often an absolute necessity but are specifically required in a preservation context due to the complexity of open solutions and the critical business functions they enable. Ultimately though, open software still enables more choice, even in situations where your open solution ends up costing a similar amount to a private one, and the option for you to use and maintain it totally independently is always there.

Another potential challenge is compatibility issues between different software tools. Open-source software may not always be compatible with other proprietary software, which can create challenges in integrating different parts of a digital preservation strategy. There may also be concerns with the long-term sustainability of open-source software solutions. Open-source software may not receive regular updates or bug fixes and may become obsolete over time. This is certainly not unique to open software, though, and proprietary digital preservation software that is developed by an ephemeral or non-committed vendor is equally liable to suffer from sustainability challenges. It's also important to note that the root of compatibility issues between proprietary and open solutions is commonly the rejection of interoperable standards on the part of the proprietary developer, not the other way around, but this is irrelevant to an archivist who is deeply immersed in a specific ecosystem of software and who's choice is restricted.

Do what's right by your collections

No matter the benefits and drawbacks of open and proprietary solutions, the optimal solution for any digital preservation challenge will always be decided on a purely case-by-case basis. As tends to be a theme in digital preservation, there is no one size fits all solution. Despite this, there are clear advantages to open-source software that are reflected in the design and principles of digital preservation best-practice guidelines. Our digital curation platform, Curate, is built entirely from the most trusted open-source digital preservation tools available but comes with the user experience and quality of life niceties that you'd expect from a premium, proprietary solution. If you can't quite believe us, check out our totally free live demo to test Curate instantly, or get in touch with us if you'd like to truly experience the best of both worlds and start building your digital collections with Curate today.

Emulation Entropy

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 12:34:03 GMT

The Pitfalls of Technology Imitation and How It Increases Complexity Now and in the Future

Emulation is the process of encapsulating the functionality of one system to make it replicable on another system, and is often recommended as one of several viable strategies a software vendor, end user-organisation or archivist could implement to help preserve their artefacts. Emulation as a digital preservation strategy is not without its pitfalls, however: complexity, resources and dispersal of information are all natural challenges you might encounter when implementing an emulation-based digital preservation strategy. Fortunately, other digital preservation strategies, like normalisation, can naturally counter the disbenefits of emulation and synergistically form a more comprehensive digital preservation strategy.

Emulation in digital preservation is a complex task, and the nature of it means the process of developing a robust emulation of a given object often presents its own unique challenges, but the concept is summarised concisely by the Digital Preservation Coalition:

"Emulation offers an alternative solution to migration that allows archives to preserve and deliver access to users directly from original files. This technique attempts to preserve the original behaviours and the look and feel of applications, as well as informational content. An emulator, as the name implies, is a programme that runs on a current computer architecture but provides the same facilities and behaviour as an earlier one."

As noted by the DPC, emulation can be useful for preserving digital content that requires a highly specific software environment. For example, if a digital archive contains software written for an older operating system, emulation can be used to recreate that environment on a modern system. This allows the software to run as it was intended, even if the original software is no longer available or supported.

The Perfect Solution?

Expert stakeholders also argue that emulation is the only way to capture what the DPC calls "the authority" on the object, which they suggest is the original environment the object was rendered in. This makes emulation a particularly strong approach for preserving complex media content like video games, who's rapid development frequently renders older formats obsolete. Significant properties of a video game that may drastically affect how it is interacted with may be rooted directly in the environment in which it was originally intended to be played. That's also not to mention that it may be, and often is, impossible to render the game at all without emulating its original console environment. One factor that often characterises situations where emulation is intuitively the best strategy to preserve an object is the ephemeral nature of its significant properties. In a 2015 blog post, David Rosenthal offered the excellent example of Jan Robert Leegtes "Scrollbar Composition", a browser-based art piece that is entirely reliant on mechanics that have long-since been changed or removed entirely from modern software. This case perfectly encapsulates the factors that, in certain cases, make emulation the only truly precise way of capturing a digital object. Images aren't sufficient, sources describe the individual scrolling elements of the piece to "jump around randomly" and "independently of a user", and if there was any contextual dependence in the piece (randomly generated numbers or response to user input, for example) even a video would not be able to capture the original experience.

In cases other than video games, where the pace of obsolescence might not be quite so drastic, emulation also has an advantage in its depth of its coverage. Computer programmes, for example, are dependent on the operating system and critical software like coding languages. These elements tend to have much longer and deeper support cycles than media like video games, so reliant programmes generally only suffer issues related to obsolescence after far greater timescales. The upshot of this is that an archivist could deploy a single emulation environment that could allow them to authentically reproduce a wide variety of unique filetypes and objects. The same is true with complex media like video games to a lesser extent, since one emulator will generally be able to handle at least one entire generation of games (or one slice of the zeitgeist, as it were).

A Double-Edged Sword.

The strength of emulation can also be a danger: it's ability to cover a broad selection of filetypes with a small selection of emulation environments is somewhat offset by the development and technical resources needed to create each of them. In comparison to normalisation, which uses best-practice guidance to extrapolate best-case strategies out of (typically) already existent resources, emulation could require specific design and development work each time a new emulation environment is required. Each of these environments requires its own support and maintenance, lest they eventually devolve to black boxes that cannot be understood by its users. This is only compounded by any additional dependencies leveraged by the environment. Without very careful management, the quality, efficacy, or functionality of an emulation tool can suffer. Moreover, it's dangerously easy for emulation tools to face the same issues as the obsolete content it aims to reproduce and even possible for an ill-supported emulation solution to not even significantly increase the lifetime of a volatile object.

At the time of writing his blog post on emulation, David Rosenthal shared a software tool that would help facilitate the easy dissemination of emulated browser-based content exactly like the piece "Scrollbar". Unfortunately, the provided link to view "Scrollbar" using the mentioned tool has since become defunct, along with all other publicly accessible links that I could easily find to pieces that were supposedly viewable using this tool. While there is information available suggesting this software tool was in use and nothing to directly suggest it has become obsolete, though unfortunately software obsolescence often implies a quiet demise, this is a worryingly apt example of the fundamental question that can undermine emulation: how long can you stave off obsolescence? While the tool in question may be in use privately, clearly it has proven unfit for purpose in each of the public examples I have identified. The content is completely inaccessible, where common objects like images, text and video from the same sources are still perfectly understandable. In the case of "Scrollbars", I am unable to find a public working example of the original piece, but there are plenty of images. The use of this emulation tool may not have even doubled the public accessibility lifetime of this implicitly transient artwork.

Saves the past, costs the future?

The increased complexity of emulation as a strategy also impacts its storage and compute costs, and by extension the environmental efficiency of the approach. Emulation necessitates that you store not only the preserved content itself, but also the emulation environment. This increased storage requirement entails higher costs, or reduction of the total content you can preserve in your collections. Accessing and using an emulation environment is also implicitly a more computationally expensive process than simply directly rendering a derivative object in a general repository. Not only does this increase your costs over the long term, it also reduces interoperability by making your objects more difficult to access and use without specific tools, and creates a whole lot more complexity in your access system. This all comes together to potentially improve the quality of

elements of your collections, at a cost to the total content you can preserve.

The Pursuit of Properties.

Ultimately, proponents believe that emulation as a digital preservation strategy can capture more of the (or the most valuable) significant properties that comprise an object than other strategies. As we've discussed, this certainly can be the case in situations like video games where complex, novel files that cannot reasonably be preserved using alternative strategies like normalisation are typical. Unfortunately, though, the complexity of these cases also means that it's usually not possible to capture absolutely all the critical significant properties that might have a serious impact on our perception of an object. As a highly simple example, a video game developed for CRT screens viewed from a modern LCD could look fundamentally different from the original experience; in some cases, to the extent that a faithful recreation designed specifically to capture the analogue visual idiosyncrasies of a CRT set in software may provide a more accurate representation of a video game than an emulated copy of the true original viewed through a modern LCD. This begs the question, is the cost of emulation worth the potential benefit when it is impossible to contain all the properties that precisely characterise an object? Would it be more productive to recreate obsolete artefacts like art-pieces using new technology, instead of investing in emulation of the original, to better preserve the access experience? These questions precipitate intensely complex debates that cannot be solved in blog posts, no matter how verbose.

Emulation: A Valuable Asset in Your Preservation Toolkit, but not a Panacea.

Despite the disbenefits, emulation clearly has its advantages in the depth of significant properties it is able to capture as a digital-preservation strategy and is a useful approach to have in the toolkit of any digital curator. That being said, owing to the technical complexity, cost and reduced interoperability, it's likely not the most efficient strategy to apply to the bulk of your collections. It could be valuable to create a specific hybrid approach when designing your archives, with clear guidelines identifying objects suitable for emulation. With a synergistic preservation plan with multiple strategies taken in to account, you are able to take advantage of emulation to capture complex, volatile formats like video games while still being able to rely on simpler, leaner approaches like normalisation for the bulk of more-common content. This gives you the benefit of deeper, richer captures of potentially significant content while reducing costs and complexity, all while improving interoperability and accessibility. The critical thing to always keep in mind is that there is no silver-bullet or one-size fits all approach in digital preservation, and we should always strive to develop better guidance and processes that improve the reliability and accessibility of collections.

As always, be sure to explore some of the more detailed material on emulation and related concepts linked below from fantastic sources like the DPC to get a more detailed perspective:

Emulation and Virtualisation as Preservation Strategies, David Rosenthal.

Preservation Action Strategies, Digital Preservation Coalition.

Demystifying ISO 16363: A Path To Building An Archive That Lasts

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 10:23:32 GMT

The essential basics guide to ISO 16363 ��

Building digital archives is increasingly becoming an essential activity for organisations as they seek to preserve the value of and provide access to their most valuable digital information. As business critical data, whether that's historical artefacts or active files, increasingly becomes born-digital or is digitised, interest in conformance to standards that provide best practice for the ongoing protection and access of valuable assets has grown significantly. Building a digital archive that meets international standards is a highly complex process, t his is compounded by the extreme lack of easily-digestible resources that outline the basic path to attaining compliance for specialised standards like those related to digital archives.

ISO 16363

ISO 16363 is an international standard that specifies the requirements for trustworthy digital repositories. The standard was developed to provide a set of guidelines for organisations that want to build digital archives that meet a high level of quality. Actually achieving compliance with ISO 16363 requires adherence to a rigorous set of requirements, including a comprehensive audit and certification process. The guidelines delineated by ISO 16363 tend to be fairly prescriptive, so it's highly recommended that an invested organisation identifies their desire to achieve the standard before they begin designing their archive, and build compliance in to their solution from the ground-up.

16363 is famously a difficult standard to aspire to, but the outcome of which is a demonstrably more robust digital archive that is backed by some of the most carefully-considered best-practice guidance available. In this blog post, we will explore some of the most valuable lessons and best-practices we have identified from our experience interacting with ISO 16363 and systems built around it, as well as some of the challenges you might face while attempting to create a new system (or enhance an existing one) with ISO 16363 conformance.

Complexity

One of the core challenges that an organisation might face when attempting to achieve ISO 16363 is the complexity of the standard itself. The standard requires compliance with a large number of specific requirements, including those related to organizational infrastructure, digital preservation policies, risk management, and technology. Each of these requirements has a set of sub-requirements that must also be met. As a result, achieving compliance with ISO 16363 can be a complex and time-consuming process, requiring a high level of expertise and attention to detail. The broad coverage of the requirements across all facets of an archive also necessitates cross-functional collaboration between expert stakeholders in each category, which can easily turn the journey towards ISO 16363 in to a highly resource-intensive exercise. As mentioned earlier, organisations that are able to consider the details of the standard from the first phases of creating their archive have an advantage in being able to appropriately resource and plan for the required investment ahead of time.

Knowledge

Building a digital archive that meets the requirements of ISO 16363 requires a deep understanding of the principles and best practices of digital preservation. This includes knowledge of file formats, metadata, storage and retrieval technologies, and the tools and techniques used to ensure the long-term accessibility of digital information. Without knowledge of all these axioms, you'll find it near-impossible to effectively meet each requirement to the satisfaction of an accreditor. It could be valuable to perform an analysis of the knowledge and skillsets of your stakeholders before committing to ISO 16363 to ensure you have all the expertise required to confidently implement each requirement of the standard. Otherwise, you may need to invest in training and development programmes to ensure that your staff have the necessary skills and knowledge to build and maintain a compliant digital archive.

Getting down to it

What's your mission?

One of the key underpinnings required for a 16363 compliant digital archive is a mission statement that reflects its commitment to the preservation, long-term retention and management of its digital information. This means that the organisation must clearly define its purpose, goals and intent for building the digital archive. The mission statement should also align with the organisation's overall strategic goals and objectives.

A clear mission statement can also be a valuable boon as you face the ongoing challenges involved with building a compliant archive. Without a clear and concise mission statement, it can be difficult to define the scope of the archive and develop a preservation plan that meets the needs of the repository and its stakeholders. Not only can precisely summarising your organisations goals in a mission statement be a frustrating process, it can be difficult to reconcile with the technical specifics of your preservation plan. It's a good idea to involve your expert stakeholders in the mission statement process to make sure all relevant perspectives have been considered. Their input can also be invaluable in defining an effective and, perhaps more importantly, actionable preservation plan.

Prior preparation and planning prevents possibly poor preservation...

The preservation plan defines the approach the archive will take in the long-term support of its mission statement, but also should outline the specific policies and procedures the archive will follow to ensure the long-term preservation of digital content, including how it will acquire, store, manage, and provide access to the content. The plan should also define the repository's designated community and associated knowledge bases and make these definitions appropriately accessible.

You might need to document that.

Documentation is a critical component of achieving ISO 16363. It assures both stakeholders and accreditors that the archive is meeting its requirements and fully performing in its role. This entails documenting all the processes, decisions, goals, technical information and any other adjacent material that helps to build a more precise image of your archive. In addition, the repository must have appropriate contracts or deposit agreements for digital materials that it manages, preserves and provides access to. You should spend time specifying your acquisition, maintenance, access, and withdrawal policies in collaboration with depositors and other relevant parties. This ensures that there is clarity and transparency around your archive's obligations and responsibilities to its stakeholders.

The benefit of robust documentation is clear, helping you to continue ensuring that your policies and procedures are carried out in approved, consistent ways. Accreditation with a gold-standard guideline like 16363, the clearest indicator of sound and standards-based practice, is facilitated by procedural accountability and documentation.

Your Selection Of Tools Matters

Ultimately, your ability to execute on a plan that supports ISO 16363 compliance will be heavily rooted in the tools you select for your system. If you chose to arrange a DIY workflow of individual open tools, for example, you'll need to ensure that each of them is capable of satisfying the requirements related to it. Many open tools wrap several functions you'll require in your digital archive in to convenient platforms, and some of these will provide you the necessary information and data to comprise a satisfactory implementation of an ISO 16363 requirement. It's highly recommended that you identify opportunities to meet several requirements at once with one tool, this will significantly reduce the complexity of your system and the flow of data between them. Your tools will only be able to cover so much, however, and will be limited to supporting your conformance only in technical aspects and how they reinforce good-practice workflows. Any aspect of the 16363 guideline that is not founded on the technical capabilities of your tools will require more nuanced investigation.

Our Digital Curation platform, Curate, integrates many of the most common pre-ingest activities with the power to preserve your objects in ways that are built to support ISO 16363 compliance, all in a modern and intuitive interface. Using Curate in your digital archive could greatly reduce the cost, time and resource investment required for you to build an ISO 16363 conformant system or bring an existing one closer to compliance. You can check out our ISO 16363 Guide to find out more about how exactly Curate can help bring you closer to ISO 16363 by clicking the button below, or get in touch with us to have a chat about how we could collaborate to achieve better conformance for your digital archives. You can also try out our live demo to experience the speed and simplicity of Curate for yourself right now.

The Internet Archive: When Rights Go Wrong

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:22:57 GMT

When Rights Go Wrong

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation founded in 1996 with the mission of preserving and providing universal access to all human knowledge. With a collection of over 1.4 million books, historical documents, and cached versions of websites, the Archive is a digital repository of immense value. Despite its admirable goal of preserving collective knowledge, the Archive has recently found itself embroiled in a controversy surrounding its practices. The crux of the controversy is its Emergency Library programme, which allowed unlimited borrowing of eBooks during the COVID-19 pandemic. The programme, which was initially planned to last through to June 30, 2020, was ended earlier than expected due to legal pressure from publishers. Legal action ( read the full judgement here ) has recently concluded that The Archive was not acting in good-faith with regards to copyright law, and it was not reasonable under fair use to distribute unlimited digital copies of a limited number of distributor-owned physical books. Instead, the court considered the digital copies derivative works and therefore incompatible with the original copyright holders rights. How this specifically affects the Archives services going forwards is currently unclear but ,since the scope of the criticism against The Archive also extends to their general digital-library practice, it's fair to assume they may be forced to rescind a number of their records and absolutely will consider their rights-management policies more carefully in the future, despite their protestations at the outcome of the legal action ( check out their full response here ) .

NB: With any subject as contentious as legal action, misinformation is an even greater risk than usual. We would urge you to consult as many official sources as possible for trustable information about the ongoing controversy.

The implications of the debate are extremely relevant to the construction of robust Digital Archives: it's easy to assign the highest risk value to, for lack of a better word, impressive and obvious dangers your content might face over long periods. Risks like natural disaster or dramatic system failures are relatively easy to plan for and, realistically, are actually typically well planned-for eventualities. This specific case neatly distills the peril of a significantly less glamorous, and oft under-addressed, risk that has an even greater potential to seriously disrupt or affect your ability to protect your collections: rights management.

Digital Archive best-practice unilaterally recommend rights-management strategies that are designed to circumvent scenarios like this one and, true, you're unlikely to find your own collections at the centre of a rights debate of this scale, but it's important nonetheless to recognise the risk improper rights-management can pose to your Digital Archives.

A Pressing Issue

While it is important to protect and provide access to valuable resources, the unprecedented availability of new tools that empower vast numbers of people to generate content means protection of our intellectual property is becoming a more prominent issue for everyone, not just businesses. Given the ease with which digital content can be copied and distributed, it is essential that content creators are able to protect their IP.

More robust application of archiving principles, such as rights management, ensure that only authorised users have access to copyrighted material, publishers and content creators can maintain control over their intellectual property without preventing access to those who need it.

There Is No Silver Bullet

Unfortunately, the foundations on which our collective application of copyright law to digital objects are built on assumptions made about physical materials. These paradigms are well-established and tested in practical reality, but do not always fit the inherently different characteristics of digital objects. As the Digital Curation Centre aptly summarises:

"The legal framework for undertaking preservation work on digital material is not as well developed and good preservation practices are not always recognised, or allowed for, by existing provisions in current legislation."

- Digital Curation Centre, Legal Compliance

You can circumvent some of these challenges by collaborating closely with your depositor and/or the rights holder of the content to ensure that all parties are satisfied with your rights management strategy. Clearly this leaves a gap, however, in situations where either the rights of a given object are so confused as to be unworkable, or when close collaboration with a rights holder is not possible.

Better To Not Preserve Than Risk Your Collections.

Ultimately, the only true remedy to these fuzzier situations is simply to not do it. If you are unable to approach the preservation of a given object with due respect to the rightsholder, it's almost always better to not preserve the object at all. Consider the worst case: if a rightsholder was to take action against your Archives for your rights management practices, like has occurred with the Internet Archive, the cost of damage control could easily interrupt your capability to maintain your collections at all. The DCC again concisely summarises this advice :

"It is important that licensing issues, copyright and any other intellectual property rights in digital resources to be preserved, are clearly identified and access conditions agreed with the depositor and/or rights holders. If the legal ownership of these rights is unclear or excessively fragmented it may be impractical to preserve the materials and for users to access them. Rights management should therefore be addressed as part of collection development and accession procedures and be built in to institutional strategies for preservation."

- Digital Curation Centre, Legal Compliance

This highlights another essential axiom to proper rights management:

Rights management should be built in to your collections from the ground up.

If you have already begun producing archival packages, it's may be too late. The only way to maintain compliant rights management policies is to start with compliant rights management policies. You should consult as many resources from your local Digital Archives best-practice authorities as possible to gain the deepest understanding of rights management you possibly can before constructing your system and building your collections, and always ensure you are maintaining an open and collaborative dialog with your depositors.

Preserving New and Novel Files: Navigating Uncharted Digital Waters

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 15:39:53 GMT

Navigating Uncharted Digital Waters

One of the biggest challenges facing the digital preservation community is the relentless pace at which new and unique filetypes emerge, which often necessarily lack established best practices for preservation. While common digital files like images and documents have had new file extensions introduced over-time, the raw meaning and intent of an image or document of any extension can still generally be retained; even if they include new features or ways to express their content that cannot necessarily be precisely reproduced by a normalised format.

New and novel file formats, however, present several unique challenges.

Case: Preserving 3D Data

For example, 3D scanning systems capture data in a variety of formats, depending on the hardware and software platforms used to create the data. Some formats may be proprietary, while others may be open but lack the necessary context for long-term preservation. These systems are also evolving constantly, which can accelerate the obsolescence of older formats (think the wild west of word-processing software before office became dominant). Software developers are constantly adding new facets to the data their tools produce, and each of these new elements have to be assessed for their significance and whether the value of the digital object as a whole is dependent on it's preservation. This problem is also compounded by the nature of business-to-business software markets, where closed and proprietary can often represent the opportunity to offer a totally unique proposition. CAD systems, for instance, often use closed, proprietary file formats that each can express different features or data that is supported by that CAD ecosystem and in turn introduce a serious lack of interoperability between software and create additional work for digital archivists.

Case: Preserving Switch Games (and other consoles)

Similarly, video games present another set of specific challenges. These games often rely on proprietary hardware and software, making it difficult to accurately emulate them on different systems. The Nintendo Switch, for example, features a highly distinctive hardware design with several interactive elements and properties that cannot accurately be replicated on "standard" computing systems, or emulated with software. You would not be able to replicate the haptic feedback or positional tracking capabilities of the Switch controller, which can often comprise a major part of the mechanics of a Switch game, without dedicated hardware. Stakeholders must ultimately decide whether a unique feature of a given platform comprises a "significant property" of it's output content; while the haptic or positional capabilities of a Switch controller may be a major piece of a games' interaction or feedback mechanisms, they're not implicitly elements that must be preserved in order to maintain the value of the game over time. In that example, preserved copies of Switch games could simply be interacted with through more standard interfaces (keyboard, contemporary controller) and the context of their original control and feedback mechanisms recorded with simple descriptive metadata. The value of the game as an artefact that is historically, socially or informationally significant is almost unchanged.

The formats, arrangement and content of the files that make up games and 3D data formats themselves can also be highly complex structured groupings of data that might only be consistent for a single generation of devices and are likely to not be backwards-compatible enhancements of previous structures.

Good enough

The challenge of preserving content like Switch games, 3D scanning data or CAD data without established best practices requires a proactive and innovative approach. It's essential that Digital Archivists stay up-to-date with emerging technologies that relate to their collections and collaborate across disciplines to develop new preservation strategies that address the unique challenges posed by these new file types.

Standards are the natural way to encourage best-practice, but the new challenges presented by modern filetypes can often necessitate that we adopt what Jenny Mitcham, a star of the Digital Preservation community, described in an article discussing sustainable preservation as "good enough" practice.

https://www.dpconline.org/blog/enacting-environmentally-sustainable-preservation-some-thoughts

It's important to note that while Jenny was referring to making concessions in our decision-making process to the environmental impact of digital preservation, there are clear parallels to the obstacles presented by preserving new and novel filetypes. It would be unreasonable for standards and guidance to keep up with the pace of the development of these systems, so concessions must necessarily be made and a level of loss of data must be tolerated. In her article, Jenny aptly notes that this is something Digital Archivists are used to under the traditional pressures of time, money and staff. The need to be more discretionary with what information can reasonably be preserved will only be amplified as the pace of emerging technologies increases.

What comes next?

Ultimately, it's important to maintain focus on the distilled impetus of most digital preservation efforts: to maintain the value of digital content over time. This means to this end are constantly modulated by external factors, and we are likely to see more consideration paid towards the more poignant ones in the way we approach digital preservation. It's possible we will see a shift in focus from archivists striving to achieve the most thorough representation of their collections, to instead optimising their workflows to retain as much (or perhaps little) information about an object as required to protect it's core value (or it's "significant properties") and nothing more.

In practical terms, efforts from standards bodies and continued collaboration and discourse with people who have true expertise with a given unique format is the only reliable way to unify a robust strategy for preserving emerging filetypes.

Integrity Checking in Digital Preservation: Why, How and When?

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 14:35:33 GMT

Integrity Checking in Digital Preservation: The Essential Basics Guide ��

Integrity checking is a crucial step in ensuring the usability and accessibility of your digital archives over long periods. Not only can integrity checking guarantee that your content has made the journey in to your preservation workflow free of damage, you can also continuously identify any future corruption to your files and take action to repair or replace them as needed. Without a way to guarantee the stability of files, like integrity checking, your collections can easily become susceptible to corruption.

Actually implementing an integrity checking policy can be challenging; there are several decisions about your tools and processes that have to be carefully considered for their feasibility, efficacy and the ease of integration in to your existing setup.

This essential guide will help you understand the very basics of integrity checking, and equip you with the knowledge to begin building an effective integrity checking system.

Checksums, checksums, checksums

Checksums are an essential component of an integrity checking system. In very simple terms, a checksum is a value calculated from the raw data of a file which forms a discrete representation of the file's bit-level makeup. When a file is changed or modified in any fashion, no matter how minor or the cause, it's almost guaranteed the resultant checksum value that could be generated for that file would change. By comparing the checksum of a file at different points in time, you can detect any changes or damage to the file. There are several types of checksums, called check-summing algorithms, including MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-256, each with different strengths and weaknesses.

Dr Matthew Addis produced an excellent paper on behalf of the DPC detailing the process of selecting an appropriate algorithm, I'd recommend exploring it for a much closer analysis of check-summing algorithms and related factors that might affect your decision making process:

https://www.dpconline.org/docs/technology-watch-reports/2399-twgn-checksums-addis/file

How?

To generate checksum values for your files, you'll need to get your hands on some appropriate software. It's wise to always inform your selection of tools by how smoothly they will fit with your workflow, not just how powerful or feature rich they are. The excellent Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR) project, maintained by the Open Preservation Foundation and the Digital Preservation Coalition, offers a broad set of recommendations of check-summing tools with differing features, algorithms and workflows:

https://coptr.digipres.org/index.php/Fixity

You'll also need a way to record past and future checksum values of files and compare them. If a file's checksum has changed, you can investigate further to determine if the file has been damaged.

While a DIY workflow is a great option for smaller collections, it can quickly become time-consuming and cumbersome to manage as your collection grows.

When?

Common best-practice guidelines frequently recommend that you perform integrity checks at several critical stages of your preservation workflow:

Before and after an object is ingested in to your workflow to ensure the transfer of data occurred with no damage or corruption to the object.

At regular intervals after ingestion

And for an even more secure workflow, you can perform checks in response to specific events.

Implementing and actioning an effective integrity checking policy can become exponentially more challenging when your target content is spread across different storage environments and stages of your workflow. You'll need to ensure you can enact your periodic checks consistently, that you have records to maintain the trail of checksums for an object and that you thoroughly verify your entire collection to avoid files slipping through the net.

If you're working with a small collection of personal files for your own archives, or only need to preserve a small slice of content, you could maintain a schedule with your calendar. Unfortunately this can come at a significant cost to the time you have available to manage your collections. Our software platform, Curate, automatically manages integrity checking for you in the background and silently repairs any damage from it's redundant storage services. You can try it out right now with our interactive demo:

Monitor and Review

Regardless of the integrity checking system you choose, it's essential to monitor the results of your process to ensure that your files remain intact and accessible. You will also need to make sure your backup and recovery strategy is solid and can provide the resources to repair any compromised files identified by your integrity checking system.
Whether you choose to implement a DIY workflow or use a comprehensive platform like Curate, regularly checking the integrity of your files is essential to maintaining their usability and accessibility over time.

For more information on best practices for integrity checking and digital preservation, get in touch with your local Digital Preservation guidance authority or explore the resources available at https://www.dpconline.org/ , https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ , or https://ndsa.org/ .

Say Goodbye To The Preservation Backlog

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 17:15:14 GMT

Why do we still think about "Appraisal" as if it was the early 2000's?

The Problem with Traditional Appraisal Guidance

Without effective appraisal, digital preservation efforts can quickly become overwhelming and unsustainable. Appraisal, selection and arrangement often dominates the time a custodian of a given collection has available to build their archives.

This is intuitive to most people, even those with no Digital Archives experience. While recently describing the basic process of building a Digital Archive to general IT stakeholders, an interesting question was raised:

This should hit close to home for many Digital Archivists: a significant portion of their available time is dedicated to understanding pre-ingest digital objects, describing them with metadata and selecting for preservation.

Traditional appraisal guidance for Digital Preservation typically focuses on selecting only the most significant or valuable materials for long-term preservation. In a 2001 paper, Michael Piggott posited a set of "Almost universal truisms" related to appraisal:

Piggott, M. Appraisal - The State of the Art. Australian Society of Archivists Conference and Seminar Papers. May 2001. [Online] http://www.archivists.org.au/sem/misc/piggott.html (Accessed 22/08/05).

It seems reasonable to conclude that the main driver behind these assumptions, which are reflected across key Digital Preservation guidelines, was the technological zeitgeist that contemporary Digital Archivists were obliged to operate in. They key impetus behind many of these concepts can be summarised with one word:

Storage.

Storage was expensive, difficult to procure and manage in large quantities, and posed significant barriers to entry in order to comprise an element of an effective digital archive. As a direct implication of this, Digital Archivists were forced to make concessions on what they were capable of preserving and retaining for the long-term, the motivations are clear:

• to reduce the bulk of material for permanent preservation

• to gain greater intellectual control over the most valuable information contained in the archives

• limit the cost of storing and processing the archive

The issue with this approach is that it's inevitable that potentially valuable content could be either disposed of or put at significant risk. The ideal for any Digital Archivist would be for 'every possible piece of content' to be perfectly understood and preserved, so that there is inherently zero chance that anything that is or could be valuable is put at risk.

And of course, the volume of digital content being created has exploded and keeps growing, which seemingly only exacerbates the issues with the common approach: a very small proportion of content can even be appraised, let alone preserved, leaving a vast build-up of unsecured objects which Digital Archivists have collectively coined: "The Preservation Backlog".

What has changed?

Since much of this common guidance was ideated, not only has the density, accessibility and durability of huge amounts of storage risen to an almost unfathomable level by past-standards, it has also gotten exponentially cheaper to procure, easier to manage and offers unlimited flexibility.

A lack of focus on the specific implementation of an effective appraisal process has stagnated any development on more specialised tools and strategies for Digital Archivists that take advantage of this change. It would be impossible to address the myriad ways the existing appraisal process could be improved with software and revised strategies in one post, but what is abundantly clear is:

Storage is cheap enough to store significantly more content in a digital archive than in the past
Compute resources (Cloud, on premise) are cheaper, faster and more simple to leverage than in the past
Software has the potential to vastly improve the efficiency of Digital Preservation activities than in the past

What does it mean? A New Approach to Appraisal.

Digital Archivists do not have to be as selective with their pre-ingest content as they were in the past.

With the pressure of cost of storage and the stress of the preservation backlog completely taken off of the Archivist, they could be free from the requirement to reduce bulk and empowered to chase what is the truly valuable part of the appraisal process:

Intellectual control over the information

This opens up the potential for a new high-level approach to building Digital Archives which is almost unilaterally improved.

From the old way:

Accession
Appraise
Arrange
Describe
Preserve
Retain

To the new way:

Accession
Preserve
Curate (Appraise, describe, arrange, select)
Retain

We call this evolved process of appraisal, arrangement and selection "Curation" .

By performing the essential actions to secure all of their content pre-ingest, Archivists could keep all of their content secure and remove the debilitating stress of "The Preservation Backlog". Appraisal, arrangement and description can become iterative, cyclical processes that are performed by the Archivist whenever they are able.

This approach recognises that all digital content has potential value, even if it may not be immediately apparent. It also guarantees the security of all of the future value that does or could exist in an Archivists entire collections.

By preserving a broader and deeper range of materials, we can ensure that future generations have access to more rich and diverse digital records.

What tools do Digital Archivists use to action the old approach? Are the current solutions not adequate?

A consistent lack of focus on developing new practices and tools specifically for appraisal, arrangement and selection is a major contributing factor to the ubiquitous preservation backlog. There is a marked absence of dedicated platforms that facilitate these processes compared to the abundance of tools designed to carry out technical preservation actions or to make objects publicly accessible, many of which you may be familiar with.

As a result, Archivists are often forced to build an entirely customised Curation workflow made up of many pieces of software. It's easy to underestimate the incredibly broad and disparate selection of tools and capabilities you might require to appraise, select and organise your collections:

Capability to view, render or interact with many different kinds of data, even potentially exotic or outdated filetypes.
- Photo viewers
- Video viewers
- Document renderers
- Spreadsheet software
- 3D model renderers
- Metadata visualisers

Physical storage in which to keep your pre-ingest collections

An advanced filesystem that enables you to browse your pre-ingest collections and manipulate their structure to create cogent archival-units.

Advanced search and filtering tools to help you find and sort pre-ingest content.

Tools to help you move content on to later stages of your workflow

Tools that allow you to report or otherwise visualise your pre-ingest content

A software environment that is powerful enough to integrate all of these disparate features is incredibly hard to create and even harder to maintain. While this approach could be described as "functional", that is about as strong a plaudit you could award it. It lacks specificity for the workload, involves a huge amount of maintenance and a significant investment from the Archivist into their technical skillsets. That's not even to mention the implicit difficulties in having access to those tools in the right place at the right time.

Appraising, Arranging and Selecting Digital Content in 2023: Curate.

Of course, the best way to prove this approach to Digital Preservation is to implement it. We believe this should begin with and always return to the development of better tools for Archivists .

Our software platform, Curate, is the first that is designed specifically to implement this revolutionary approach to digital preservation and addresses many of the key challenges we have identified with the current state the appraisal process and the implications it has on a wider Digital Preservation workflow:

From the tools to appraise and understand your content, the capability to enrich it with descriptive metadata, integration with many additional preservation tools, full arrangement functionality, easy access to cheap Archival-quality storage and a unified selection of options to view and interact with your collections, Curate is the only platform that wraps every tool you need to start building robust Digital Archives into a modern and performant user experience.

Try it out today to discover how simple it can be to secure your digital objects.

Custom tags in Curate!

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 15:46:33 GMT

New in Curate, custom tags!

We're excited to be able to announce an exciting new feature for Curate: custom tags.

Custom tags offer an entirely new way to organise, sort, search and understand your files. Along with the capability to add simple ISAD(G) or Dublin Core-based descriptive metadata templates to your objects, you can now add your own completely custom values in the form of colourful tags. Tags allow you to break down barriers between your separate files and build a better understanding of the content in your collections.

Adding tags to an object enables several new powerful organisational functions for you to explore when interacting with your collections:

Information at a glance

Your tags appear front and centre of the file-display, intuitively telling you about the content you're viewing at a quick glance.

Enhanced search and filtering

Search all of your files for objects with a certain tag attached
Associate objects in any location by giving them the same tag
Group and associate objects in as many ways as you like, as many times as you like on every file
Combine tags to create advanced multi-level filters and return highly specific files buried in various locations in your collections

To get started with custom tagging in Curate, select one or many of your files or folders and look for the "Custom tags" field in the metadata panel, then get tagging! Curate will assign a special colour to each of your tags and remember them for next time.

Give it a shot and let us know what other great features you'd like to see in future Curate updates to empower your workflow!

Virus Checking to Protect Digital Archives: How And Why?

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 17:23:51 GMT

The Basics Of Virus Checking in Digital Preservation: The Essential Guide ��

Implementing a virus checking system in your digital preservation workflow is an important step to protect your collections from viruses, malware, and other malicious software. Virus checks can help to detect and remove any threats that could damage or corrupt your files, helping to ensure their longevity and accessibility- and the safety of other content in your digital archives.

The National Archives note that virus checking is an essential step in building a digital archive . The tricky part- how exactly do I implement virus checking in my digital preservation workflow?

1. Choose a virus scanning tool

The first step in implementing a virus checking system is to choose your virus scanning software. It's important to select reliable and reputable software that is frequently updated to ensure your files are checked against up-to-date sources.

Popular free options include AVG and the open-source tool ClamAV . Some solutions will be less specialised to the task of scanning your collections in bulk, and some may support additional features like command-line tools that can greatly increase the efficiency of your workflow- at the cost of ease-of-use. Your choice should consider how well the software integrates with your existing workflow, and how complex it will be to manage an effective virus checking policy with your chosen tools.

Ultimately, you can opt to make use of whatever virus scanning solutions your organisation already subscribes to; but you'll likely miss out on many of the powerful workflows using a tool with command line features like ClamAV enables.

Curate, our Digital Curation platform, automatically scans every file you upload using both signature and heuristic-based checks- Try it out with one click by checking out our demo and uploading a file.

2. Define your virus checking policy

Once you have selected a virus scanning software, the next step is to define your virus checking policy. Digital archiving best-practice guidelines commonly recommend a 30-day quarantine period. This means that any files that have been introduced to your system are quarantined in an isolated location for 30 days. This allows time for any potential threats to be identified and contained before the files are released back into the workflow.

The practicality and ease of implementing and managing this policy is a entirely different question, in-fact it can be incredibly challenging to define the finer details of how to ensure your policy is adhered to. On their excellent blog UK Digital Preservation community contributor Rachel MacGregor notes about their experience implementing a 30 day quarantine policy:

"So the next question is - how do I manage the quarantine process? I can find very little written about the nitty gritties of this - any pointers gratefully received. In the meantime: Outlook calendar reminder..." - Do not attempt this at home, an old hand digital.

It's worth addressing these issues ahead of time: how will you manage your quarantined files? How will you ensure the 30-day release scan is carried out?

You could use Curate to automate the entire quarantine and release process , without having to constantly worry about the ongoing status of your quarantined files or the safety of your collections.

3. Define scanning actions

Once the virus checking policy has been determined, you will need to define the actions to be taken when a threat is detected. It's essential to prepare a plan to action immediately when a file is found to be compromised in order to protect your collections and pre-ingest files. You might want to investigate the deposit the infected file came from to ensure there's no more malicious content, or potentially even contact the source of the acquisition to prevent any future incidents.

You should follow the advice of your local Digital Preservation authorities recommended best-practice on how to treat compromised content, but it's imperative to ensure the rest of your collections are immediately safe from any threats. Curate instantly isolates any infected content in a secure location and clearly identifies it, allowing you to either destroy or safeguard it while you investigate the source.

4. Monitor, Protect

After the scanning has been completed, it is important to monitor the ongoing efficacy of your workflow. If the implementation you have settled upon is too complex, or something is preventing you from efficiently scanning all of your collections, it could be valuable to reassess your options. Review your results frequently to ensure that your tools and virus checking policy are up-to-date and functioning smoothly. Keeping a log of scanning results can also help to track and identify any potential issues, or allow you to enrich your preservation metadata later.

Implementing a virus scanning system in your digital preservation workflow is an important step to ensure the usability and accessibility of your digital archives. By selecting reliable virus scanning tools, setting up an effective policy following best-practice and frequently reassessing your workflow, you can ensure that your collections are protected from threats and that their longevity and accessibility are maintained.

Seek out the latest guidelines and information from your local Digital Preservation authority. For more information on guidelines that inform this article, visit:

Try out the live Curate demo to see how easy it can be to take care of this entire process completely automatically !

Curate demo now available!

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:41:26 GMT

You can now give Curate and all its features a try without even signing up!

Curate is now available to demo live on our website, with absolutely no sign-up details required. You can freely upload your files and test all of Curates functionality, or demonstrate it to a colleague, with two clicks.

The demo will reset every 60 minutes, so play around with the system as you please and it will be cleaned periodically.

Our interactive tour will guide you through the basics of uploading, quarantining and performing some simple description and characterisation on your files. To begin the tour, simply log in to the Curate live demo.

If at any point you need assistance or you'd like to talk more with us about how Curate could take the stress out of managing your digital archives, just click the "Fancy a chat?" button on the bottom right hand corner of the interface.

Try it out!

Click the new "Demo" button at the top of our website, or use the button below, to give Curate a shot instantly!

Curate has launched!

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 17:03:54 GMT

We've launched!

We're excited to finally announce the launch of Curate, the first digital curation platform built specifically to take the stress out of building and managing digital archives.