DCH-RP:Scenarios

WP5: Proofs of Concept

Scenarios

PoC Phase 1

PoC Phase 2

DCH Glossary

The DCH-RP Work Package 5 will conduct experimental proofs of concept reflecting scenarios that are elemental to the development of a roadmap for the DCH community.

Theme	ID	Title	Description
1. Organisational challenges	Scenario 1.1	Using specialised research tools with preserved inhouse material	A major memory institution in France which has its own development team is gradually implementing a solution for digital preservation. It is using local in-house storage. The institution participates in projects which aggregate content to Europeana and regularly uses social media channels to engage with the wider public. Thus, the access to its digital collections is either possible through the institutional website, or resource discovery is made via specialised portals and social media which in fact redirect the users to the institutional webserver. Recently, it has happened several times that researchers ask to use specialised document analysis tools that are available through an e-Infrastructure. This raises issues of sharing content outside the institutional storage and preservation facilities on the cloud used by the eInfrastucture, or the use of ‘external’ tools for processing locally stored documents. Both options raise concerns, and for the time being there is no good solution for the end users.
	Scenatio 1.2	Integrating a new tool into an existing institutional infrastructure	A major memory institution in Germany had already developed its own preservation infrastructure. A new research project is asking for a newly developed software tool that would save time on checking file formats. However, the integration of this tool with the existing preservation solution cannot compromise any essential preservation features implemented in the local preservation system. The requirement is to analyse the difference that using the new tool will make and how to embed it with other components already in place; or how to run the new tool from a cloud-based provider and integrate this service with the existing preservation solution.
	Scenatio 1.3	Selecting a digital preservation solution in the case of an institution with only voluntary IT support	A little museum in Malta has a historical library and a digitised personal archive collection. The museum has staff of only 9 and only voluntary IT support. The director of the museum is aware of the need to organise digital preservation for the digitised documents, but is not sure how to do it. He receives periodically offers for long-term storage of digital content, but finds it difficult to select or to make a decision. He has practically no IT competence to rely on for decision-making, but is convinced that the decision should be forward-looking and accommodate the needs of the museum for the next 5 years.
	Scenatio 1.4	Preservation from a consortium of collections on the cloud	A specialised consortium of several institutions working on a complete digital repository of the works of a modern digital artist who worked and exhibited in 15 different countries has to resolve the issue of preservation of objects that are stored in different location. The works of the digital artist include a variety of digital formats as well as especially developed software tools. The curator of the collection has to identify a cost efficient solution which would also be suitable to store the complex objects in the collection. An additional difficulty is that the copyrights on the objects differ in the countries of origin of the objects.
	Scenatio 1.5	Preserving a 3D visualisation	A research lab in the UK is collaborating with an archaeological site in Italy to create a 3D visualisation of an ancient building. The visualisation is used as scientific documentation. Both institutions have to agree who will take care for the preservation in usable state of the model. There is also an issue of interoperability of the model with a free visualisation tool which can be used to show the model on a web site which is resolved producing a lower quality visualisation in an additional format. There is an ongoing discussion whether it also needs to be preserved and by whom.
2. End user concerns	Scenatio 2.1	Researcher discovers a historical database	Researcher in history discovers a historical database resource presenting parish records. She would like to use the data, but she is also concerned to what extent these data could be trusted (authenticity, error rates introduced, errors caused by any transformations needed).
	Scenatio 2.2	Research and select a tool serving a specific purpose	A university lecturer in art history wants to use a collection of digitised art images made 15 years ago. They are stored in a format he is not familiar with. Since there are about 200 images, the researcher is looking for tools which would convert them into a format he could easily use in batch mode. He is not sure how to identify a tool or a service which could do this.
	Scenatio 2.3	Accessing digitised content from schools	Secondary school students are making an assignment looking at historical maps of their village. They already paid a visit to the local museum but discovered some old digitised maps on the internet.
	Scenatio 2.4	Gain access to archived websites	A history student interested in natural history discovers that Riksarkivet has archived the "Linnéjubilet" web site http://www.riksarkivet.se/default.aspx?id=23153 .He wonders how he can get access to it (the link www.linne2007.se obviously doesn't work anymore).
3. Testing existing services and defining new ones	Scenatio 3.1	Proof of authenticity in distributed archiving	The Swedish National Archives takes 10 digitised images of records and ingests them into their national GRID where they undergo a migration cycle or some other processing and the SNA requires a proof of authenticity at the end of this.
	Scenatio 3.1a	New scenario focusing on trust	During this processing, the GRID provider ask for information about SNA’s requirements for safeguarding a trustworthy repository. The SNA has to describe the methodology and tools they are using for validating their objectives and methods as well as their management of intrinsic threats and threats originating from the outside of the organisation. The purpose from the GRID providers point of view is to push the SNA to come up with trust criteria for the services it will get from the GRID.
	Scenatio 3.2	Defining new services	A small art gallery looks for the grid infrastructure for storage services that could solve the preservation problems. For that is needed new services not yet defined.
	Scenatio 3.3	Integrating new services into existing infrastructure	The IT manager of a local art gallery is preserving the digital content using grid X. He attends a workshop on digital preservation where he hears about a new tool for checking the integrity of digital objects. He needs to implement it on the grid-based archiving solution.

More information may be found in DocDB at https://documents.egi.eu/document/1677.