the Digital Preservation System (DPS)

inspired by the WNY Library Resource Council

The DPS ensures the longevity of all digital collections in a ContentDM installation. It exports all changed metadata and display images nightly and also ingests original archival images for storage and replication.

WNYLRC came to us with a problem. Some of their users were treating ContentDM (an online display framework for digital collections, owned by OCLC) as if it were a preservation tool. After digitizing a collection of materials, the users were importing them into ContentDM which results in the conversion of the high resolution tiffs to smaller jpg’s for online display.

The problem is: What happens to the original tiffs? They are left on DVD, and often without records specifying which original image corresponds to which online display image. DVD’s degrade over time. Someday the images will be corrupted and lost if we don’t get them on to a live hard disk where an active filesystem can correct for media errors.

We listened, analyzed, and prototyped the Digital Preservation System to solve this problem.

It automatically pulls in every bit of metadata from the live site and stores it in a database where it can be replicated and rejoined with the original images. Entire collections can be exported (metadata + display images + archival images) with a few mouse clicks.

Our current task list includes:

  • Expanding the system to provide multi-site replication for all data
  • Integrating an e-commerce component that will allow users to purchase hi-res archival images from the DPS
  • Finalizing our Automatic Image Matching software, which visually “recognizes” nearly identical images and allows us to rapidly ingest archival images and place them with the matching display image

Please contact us if you want more information about the Digital Preservation System. It is still undergoing rapid development and is in the process of being deployed for the NY Heritage group of collections, where it will protect hundreds of thousands of digital objects for dozens of institutions across New York State.