OPF Blog: User-Driven Digital Preservation

A new OPF blog entry: User-Driven Digital Preservation. Reproduced below...

We recently posted an article on the UK Web Archive blog that may be of interest here, User-Driven Digital Preservation, where we summarise our work with the SCAPE Project on a little prototype application that explores how we might integrate user feedback and preservation actions into our usual discovery and access processes. The idea is that we need to gather better information about which resources are difficult for users to use, and which formats they would prefer, so that we can use this data to drive our preservation work.

The prototype also provides a convenient way to run Apache Tika and DROID on any URL, and exposes the contents of its internal 'format registry' as a set of web pages that you can browse through (e.g. here's what it knows about text/plain). It only supports a few preservation actions right now, but it does illustrates what might be possible if we can find a way to build a more comprehensive and sustainable system.