Poster (Text) - iPRES 2014 - Melbourne

The digital preservation community has had a chequered history in developing software tools to perform operations essential for preserving digital data. Poor technology choices, half measures in adopting open source approaches, insufficient engagement with users, finite project funding and an array of other challenges have hampered tool development. Gaps in capability are common but even where tools have been created to take on a particular problem, they ofien face patchy support and an uncertain future. Lessons have however been learned from mistakes that have been made in the past. User engagement and an agile development approach can focus solutions on real problems. Adoption and expansion of existing tools (sometimes from outside of this community) can yield greater and more dependable results. Focused designs can make adoption easier. Sharing the experimentation and data behind tool development and assessment can be as invaluable as the tools themselves. This paper provides an outline of lessons learned from developing digital preservation tools across JISC and EU fimded digital preservation projects, such as PLANETS and SCAPE and more recently from agile hackathon and mashup events run by SPRUCE.

iPRES 2014, Digital Preservation, User Requirements, Digital Preservation Tools, Open source development

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Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Digital Preservation

iPRES

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