Paper - iPRES 2008 - London

Many international institutions and organizations responsible for managing large distributed collections of scientific, cultural and educational resources are establishing data grids that employ the San Diego Supercomputer Centre’s Storage Resource Broker (SRB) for managing their collections. Over time, maintaining access to the resources stored within SRB data grids will become increasingly difficult as file formats become obsolete. Organizations are struggling with the challenge of monitoring the formats in their SRB collections and providing suitable migration or emulation services as required. Automated methods are required that notify collections managers of objects that are at risk and that provide solutions to ensure long term access. The problem is exacerbated by the often proprietary and highly eclectic range of formats employed by scientific disciplines – many of which are too uncommon to be considered by existing national digital preservation initiatives. This paper describes our test bed implementation of a set of preservation services (obsolescence detection, notification and migration) over a heterogeneous distributed collection of objects, stored in SRB. It also provides an evaluation of the performance and usability of the PresSRB system, within the context of an environmental case study.

iPRES, London

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