Automating Logical Preservation for Small Institutions with Hoppla

Preserving digital information over the long term becomes increasing important for large number of institutions. The required expertise and limited tool support discourage especially small institutions from operating archives with digital preservation capabilities. Hoppla is an archiving solution that combines back-up and fully automated migration services for data collections in environments with limited expertise and resources for digital preservation. The system allows user-friendly handling of services and outsources digital preservation expertise. This paper presents the automated logical preservation process of the Hoppla archiving system in detail. It describes the recommendation process for appropriate preservation strategies via a web update service. A set of two real world case studies were conducted based on a first rules set focused on common office documents. The promising results sustain the novel approach of automating logical preservation by outsourcing expertise.