CONNECTING PRESERVATION PLANNING AND PLATO WITH  DIGITAL REPOSITORY INTERFACES
An accepted digital preservation workflow is emerging in
which file formats are identified and those believed to be
at risk are migrated to what are perceived to be less risky
formats. This raises important questions about what to
convert and when, if at all. In other words, how to connect
file identification and migration. This area has become
known as preservation planning, and seeks to take
account of a wide variety of factors that might impact
preservation decisions. Broadly there are two approaches
to preservation planning. One provided in some digital
preservation systems is to simplify and reduce both the
number of file formats stored and therefore limit the number
of preservation tools needed based on accepted recommendations.
A more thorough, flexible and possibly
complex approach, supported by the Plato preservation
planning tool developed by the Planets project, allows decisions
on preservation actions to combine analysis of the
characteristics of different file formats with specific local
requirements, such as costs and resources. This paper
shows how Plato can be integrated with digital repository
software, in this case EPrints, to enable this powerful approach
to be used effectively to manage content in repositories
of different sizes and with varying degrees of preservation
expertise and support. These tools are accessed via
a common repository interface to enable repository managers,
and others who do not specialise in preservation, to
moderate decisions on preservation planning and to control
preservation actions.
["Hitchcock, Steve", "Rauber, Andreas", "Kulovits, Hannes", "Tarrant, David", "Carr, Les"]
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