This orginal PrestoPRIME project deliverable covers three main aspects of preservation strategy:
– The value chains and business models that underpin preservation strategy in the widest sense, i.e. addressing economics and sustainability. This addresses the need to understand where the money will come from, how to keep it coming, and how preservation and access should be done as a result.
– Specific technical preservation strategies, e.g. migration and multivalent, for keeping files alive and accessible over the long-term. The focus here is on file formats (encoding and wrappers) and the long-term total cost of preservation, especially storage. These are areas where archives are bewildered with choices and have difficulty making objective and justified decisions on what to do.
– The metadata that needs to be captured to enable long-term preservation. A valid preservation strategy has to capture at the outset all the information required to be able to take the correct actions to preserve content. But what is this metadata and how should it be structured?
The specific questions that this report addresses include:
– What file formats should I use? What storage technologies make sense?
– What is the total cost of preservation of AV files and how is this broken down?
– What preservation metadata do I need to capture and keep?
– What examples are there of how preservation can be sustained by monetising the archive or providing public access?
– What business models for preservation as a service are emerging and are archives considering these?
– What are the challenges and costs of preservation at scale?
– What metadata standards should I consider and where do they fall short?
– Are there different strategies I can use for different types of content?
To answer to some of these questions, the authors reviewed the practices and plans of several national archives and broadcasters within the PrestoPrime consortium along with the existing literature.