Administration of Digital Preservation Services in the Cloud Over Time: Design Issues and Challenges for Organizations

In organizations, information systems produce increasing amounts of digital information that needs to be preserved. Simultaneously, human intervention in preservation activities needs to be minimized, due to scarce resources available for preservation. Thus, digital preservation services need to be integrated with other organizational information systems as seamlessly as possible, and preservation activities need to be maximally automated. Selection of adequate cloud-based preservation services poses yet another set of challenges for reaching the seamless integration and automation. Two sources of challenges relate to administrating integrated digital preservation and information systems. Firstly, information systems change over time. Secondly, digital preservation services change over time. This paper contributes by identifying and analyzing scenarios and design issues of administering digital preservation in connection to the changes in information systems and preservation services over time. We also suggest seven generic tasks of the “preservation administration” component, which are needed between digital preservation services and information systems and discuss about the choices of locating the operative responsibilities and middleware.