Research Data Thing 6/23 - Data Curation & Preservation

I found the list of preservation tools listed on the ANDS data preservation page very helpful as they led me on a path through to more tools and services such as MyExperiment where researchers can share their experiment workflows and plans.

Perusing the University policies on digital preservation highlights the need for suitable resourcing to be allocated to ensure that appropriate curation is carried out. The metadata requirements are much more than simple description of the research data. It must be extended to preservation metadata such as

  • Provenance as it changes over time
  • Authenticity
  • What actions have been taken with the data eg. copying to new file formats
  • What technology is required to access the data. This will also change over time with format obsolescence
  • Rights management - this too can change over time for example embargo periods will lapse and data may then become open

Additionally institutions must commit to forward resourcing to maintain and upgrade preservation activities and systems.

This week I went through all three of the things and had a little play with DROID provided by the UK National Archives as well. Excellent if you have a need to quickly identify batches of file formats to be managed. It links to the Pronom file format registry to give you more information about each file type.
Droid identifying digital objects in a folder