Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories: TIPR

Priscilla Caplan,Joseph Pawletko,William R Kehoe

doi:10.2218/ijdc.v5i1.142

Abstract

Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) is a project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create and test a Repository eXchange Package (RXP). The package will make it possible to transfer complex digital objects between dissimilar preservation repositories.Â For reasons of redundancy, succession planning and software migration, repositories must be able to exchange copies of archival information packages with each other. Every different repository application, however, describes and structures its archival packages differently. Therefore each system produces dissemination packages that are rarely understandable or usable as submission packages by other repositories. The RXP is an answer to that mismatch. Other solutions for transferring packages between repositories focus either on transfers between repositories of the same type, such as DSpace-to-DSpace transfers, or on processes that rely on central translation services.Â Rather than build translators between many dissimilar repository types, the TIPR project has defined a standards-based package of metadata files that can act as an intermediary information package, the RXP, a lingua franca all repositories can read and write.

Highlights

Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) is a two year project partnership between the Florida Center for Library Automation, Cornell University and New York University
The project Toward Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) defines a common exchange package format based on PREMIS and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), but takes a more lightweight approach with no Hub services
2) The exchange package must be flexible enough to accommodate any repository’s Archival Information Package (AIP); that is, it must be agnostic to the internal structure of the AIP. 3) The exchange package must contain enough information for the target repository to know what it is receiving at both the package level and the representation level

Summary

Introduction

Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) is a two year project partnership between the Florida Center for Library Automation, Cornell University and New York University. Approaches to the problem A number of initiatives implement what they call “distributed” digital preservation, where copies of a repository’s content are stored in multiple locations This can be implemented with grid storage or with application-level replication as in private LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) networks (Halbert, 2009; Moore, 2006; Reich & Rosenthal, 2009). In the HandS architecture, a central Hub service provides the tools to do the mappings between the package formats native to each repository application and a common exchange format, called the “Hub Package”. The project Toward Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) defines a common exchange package format based on PREMIS and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard), but takes a more lightweight approach with no Hub services.

Design Issues

Conclusion