Wednesday, November 09, 2016

Autonomous Preservation Tools in Minimal Effort Ingest

Autonomous Preservation Tools in Minimal Effort Ingest. Asger Askov Blekinge, Bolette Ammitzbøll Jurik, Thorbjørn Ravn. Andersen.  Poster, iPres 2016.  (Proceedings p. 259-60 / PDF p. 131).
     This poster presents the concept of Autonomous Preservation Tools developed by the State and University Library, Denmark. It is an expansion of their idea of Minimal Effort Ingest. In Minimal Effort Ingest most of the preservation actions are handled within the repository when resources are available. The incoming data is to be secured quickly, even when resources are sparse. Preservation actions should happen when resources are available, rather than by a static ingest workflow.

From these concepts they created the idea of Autonomous Preservation Tools which are more like software agents rather than a static workflow system. The process is more flexible and allows for easy updates or changes to the workflow steps. A fixed workflow is replaced with a decentralised implicit workflow which defines the set of events that an AIP must go through.  Rather than a static workflow that must process AIPs in a fixed way, the Autonomous Preservation Tools "can discover AIPs to process on their own". Because AIPs maintain an record of past events tools can determine whether or not an AIP has been processed or if other Tool actions must be performed first. So the workflow is the tools finding and processing items correctly until every item has been processed.  This becomes an alternative method of processing.

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