Diplomarbeit Preserving Digital Entities A Framework for Choosing and Testing Preservation Strategies

The long-term preservation of digital objects has become increasingly relevant. Libraries, public institutions and museums, but also companies are requesting solutions to store their digital files with all relevant contents and attributes for the future. This master thesis makes two contributions to the research in digital preservation. The first attempt is the creation of a testbed which stores many files in different file formats. These files can be used to evaluate the impact of preservation solutions. In this paper an environment for storing and describing files is being suggested and implemented. The second contribution is made by presenting a framework which is based on Utility Analysis for evaluating different preservation solutions. The application of a detailed hierarchy of objectives, considering the individual requirements of the user, will allow a reasonable and clear decision for a specific preservation solution, which can be supported with arguments. The theoretic framework is evaluated in two casestudies. For the first one the whole process is being realized, for the second example only the major part of the analysis, the objective tree, is treated in detail.