Data without meaning: Establishing the significant properties of digital research

model for preserving “all the necessary properties of the data” (CEDARS Project, 2002). • Digital Preservation Testbed: Complementary research took place in the Dutch Digital Preservation Testbed Project (2000 – 2003) testing the viability of different preservation approaches for different types of government archival digital records. The research was based on the assumption that different types of records have different preservation and authenticity requirements (Potter, 2002). • National Archives of Australia: The NAA developed the concept of the “essence” as a formal mechanism to determine the characteristics that must be preserved and a “Performance model” to demonstrate that digital records are not stable artefacts; instead they are a series of performances that change over time (Heslop, Davis & Wilson, 2002). • DELOS: The preservation cluster in the EU-funded DELOS Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries built on the work of the Testbed Project and developed a metric for testing and evaluating digital preservation strategies using utility analysis and an Objective Tree (Rauch, Strodl & Rauber, 2005). • PLANETS: PLANETS is an EU-funded project that is undertaking several activities relevant to the description of significant properties, including the continued development and integration of the DELOS Utility Analysis and Objective Tree into the PLATO Preservation Planning Tool and the creation of the eXtensible Characterisation Definition/Extraction Language (XCDL/XCEL) . • JISC-funded significant properties projects: the JISC has funded four short projects to investigate the significant properties of vector graphics, moving images, learning objects and software that have produced some useful outputs (Grindley, 2008). • InSPECT Project: InSPECT is a JISC-funded two-year project performed by the Centre for e-Research at Kings College London and The National Archives. It is building on the work performed by the National Archives of Australia and Digital Preservation Testbed to develop a framework for the definition and description of significant properties, which will be integrated into the PRONOM format registry (Knight, 2008a). Although each project has a distinct conceptual basis and methodology, the outputs of earlier work have contributed to the development of subsequent projects. Criteria for Evaluating Significant Properties An implicit assumption in the use of terminology, such as “significant” and “essential” is the recognition that criteria are required against which the relative value of each property may be assessed. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “value” to be “a fair or adequate equivalent or return”. In diplomatics a distinction is made between “intrinsic value” that something has value “in its own right”and “extrinsic value” that value is derived from an external function. The InterPARES Authenticity Task Force has hypothesised that both intrinsic and extrinsic elements will play key roles in establishing the identity of a digital record (MacNeil et al., n.d.). For digital objects, value judgments made by an archivist or collection manager will determine 2 Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services (PLANETS) http://www.planets-project.eu/ The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue 1, Volume 4 | 2009 162 Data Without Meaning the level of functionality that is retained in subsequent iterations of the object. Therefore, it is valuable for staff to analyse the functionality that they require in a later iteration, as well as the needs and expectations of the stakeholders who will access and use the data. These factors may be used as a basis for evaluating the suitability of different preservation strategies (CEDARS Project, 2002; Research Libraries Group [RLG], 2002; Rothenberg & Bikson, 1999). The InSPECT Project (Knight, 2008a) as analysed several elements that may influence an institution’s interpretation of value and, as a result, the preservation activities that must be performed to maintain the various properties of the information object. These may be summarised into four categories: • Stakeholder requirements • Type of resource