Paper - iPres 2013 - Lisbon

Preserving information systems is one of the greatest challenges in digital preservation. In this paper we outline the existing strengths and shortcomings of a record-centric driven preservation approach for relational databases by lining up a state-of-the art industry database archiving tool CHRONOS against SIARD one of the most popular products in the GLAM (galleries libraries archives museums) world. A functional comparison of both software products in the use cases of database retirement, continuous and partial archiving as well as application retirement is presented. The work focuses on a technical evaluation of the software products - organizational and process aspects of digital preservation are out of scope. We explain why preserving complex structures as databases through a record centric approach does not only depend on the amount of information captured in the preservation package and present a brief overview on available functional aspects in CHRONOS that help to address the challenges of application decommissioning. The paper at hand presents the results of a case study which was undertaken 2012 at AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH.