Harvard Digital Preservation Format Assessments

Harvard Library collections include:

• a variety of computer media that will be imaged using forensic disk imaging techniques,
• image sequences, a format used primarily in motion picture film scanning, and
• video assets in a variety of formats.

These materials will be preserved in the Library’s preservation and access repository – the Digital Repository Service (DRS). As a first step towards providing support for this material in the DRS, the Library engaged AVPreserve in late 2015 to assist with the analysis. The goals of the analysis were:

• Recommended formats to accept and prefer for the DRS
• Recommended technical metadata schema(s) to use for these formats
• DRS content models for these objects
• Recommendations for enhancing Harvard Library’s FITS tool to better support these objects

The driving principles of this work were to:

• Provide interoperability with the existing metadata schemas and workflows of the DRS
• Provide sufficient metadata for long-term preservation of these objects
• Adhere to existing standards where possible
• Propose simpler models over more complex ones where possible

Specifically the analysis was conducted in three areas: formats, metadata and tools. See assessment results on the Harvard Wiki page:

• Disk Image Format Assessment Results
• Image Sequence Formats Assessment Results
• Video Formats Assessment Results