Agenda - Keeping Control - Scalable Preservation Environments for Identification, Characterisation and Validation

Overview

This first SCAPE training course focuses on one of the biggest initial challenges to digital preservation, file format identification. While there has been a lot of work in this area, the ever changing nature of digital formats realistically means the problem will never be "solved". This training course will give you the knowledge and experience to confidently choose a file formation identification and basic characterisation tools.

Further to introducing the tools this training session will bring forward the expertise of the scape project on integrating tools into your own scalable systems and workflows.

With more businesses and organisations actively deploying preservation services, there is critical need for more knowledge to be shared and services to be developed in order to inform of change. Panels and open discussion sessions will provide a valuable space for voices to discuss the latest preservation services to monitor change.

With regards to file formation identification and characterisation there are a number of recent conference papers and blogs outlining the on going challenge and many of the writers of these resources will be at the event for open face to face discussion.

(becky list the iPres scape papers and blogs on file format issues from me/maurice etc etc)

Who should attend?

Digital preservation practitioners; digital librarians and archivists, digital curators, repository managers, or anyone with a responsibility to manage digital collections. To get the most out of this training course, attendees should ideally have some experience of command line interfaces and system architecture.

Developers who actively deploy such systems are also encouraged to attend.

Learning Outcomes (by the end of the session the attendees will be able to:

Distinguish between different file types and identify the requirements for characterising each of them.
Carry out a number of identification, characterisation, and duplication detection experiments on example files.
Critically evaluate characterisation and identification tools and assess their advantages and disadvantages when used in different scenarios.
Compare and contrast the differences in running characterisation and identification tools both stand-alone and within workflows.
Envisage a system that combines workflows with identification, characterisation and validation tools to suit a variety of scenarios.
Conduct an in-depth analysis of large volumes of identification and characterisation data and find representative sample records suitable for preservation planning experiments.

Agenda:

Thursday 6 December

Time	Session	Facilitator	Learning outcomes
09.30 - 10.00	Registration
10.00 - 10.15	Welcome and housekeeping	Miguel Ferreira, KEEPS
10.15 - 11.15	Introduction to file formats Understanding the different requirements for identification and characterisation experiments File format identification and characterisation tools: file, droid, tika, exiftool What can they do? File Format Identification, File Format Characterisation, File Format Validation, File Format Signature Files	Carl Wilson, OPF Asger Blekinge, SB Dave Tarrant, OPF	1
11.15 - 11.30	Coffee
11.30 - 12.45	Applying file format tools to different scenarios (demonstrations) How do they compare?	Carl Wilson, OPF Asger Blekinge, SB Dave Tarrant, OPF	1
12.45 - 13.45	Lunch
13.45 - 15.15	Break out groups: practical exercises Creating file format profiles with an example dataset Command line processing Evaluation of the results	Carl Wilson, OPF Asger Blekinge, SB Dave Tarrant, OPF	2
15:15 - 15.30	Coffee
15.30 - 16:30	Wrapping tools for identification and characterisation FITS (File Information Tool Set) Panel session: advantages and disadvantages of wrapping tools Q&A	Petar Petrov, TUWIEN All	3
16.30 - 17.00	Wrap up	Dave Tarrant, OPF
17.00	Close
20.00	Event dinner

Friday 7 December

Time	Session	Facilitator	Learning outcomes
09.00 - 09.10	Welcome back, overview of agenda for the day	Dave Tarrant, OPF
09.10 - 10.15	Using file format identification tools as part of a workflow Introduction to Taverna workflows Demonstration: Web archive content identification over ARC files using tika in a Taverna workflow	Sven Schlarb, ONB	4
10.15 - 10.30	Coffee
10.30 - 11.45	Comparing the Taverna workflow with a DROID version of the workflow Introduction to file format identification using a Hadoop cluster (demonstration) Understanding the implementation differences	Sven Schlarb, ONB	4
11.45 - 12.15	Comparison of results	Sven Schlarb, ONB
12.15 - 13.15	Lunch
13.15 - 13.45	Content profiling and planning Introduction and motivation of large-scale content profiling for preservation analysis	Petar Petrov, TUWIEN	5
13.45 - 14.15	Practical exercise: analysing an example scenario file set without a content profiler Discussion of results	Petar Petrov, TUWIEN	6
14.15 - 14.45	c3po (A content profiling prototype) demonstration of the tool and its capabilities
14.45 - 15.15	Quality control for digital collections: the matchbox tool Identifying duplicate images in digital collections	Roman Graf, AIT	4
15.15 - 15.30	Coffee
15.30 - 16.30	Practical exercise: analysing the scenario file set using c3po Comparing the results and lessons learned	Petar Petrov, TUWIEN	6
16.30 - 17.00	Wrap up discussion and event evaluation	Dave Tarrant, OPF
17.00	Close