Let Scout be your Preservation Guide
Scout is a preservation watch system being developed within the SCAPE project. It provides an ontological knowledge base to centralize all necessary information to detect preservation risks and opportunities. It uses plugins to allow easy integration of new sources of information, as file format registries, tools for characterization, migration and quality assurance, policies, human knowledge and others. The knowledge base can be easily browsed and triggers can be installed to automatically notify users of new risks and opportunities. Examples of such notification could be: content fails to conform to defined policies, a format became obsolete or new tools able to render your content are available.
In short, Scout is a web-based service which:
- provides an ontological knowledge base for compiling the information needed to detect preservation risks and opportunities
- assists content holders in monitoring their digital repository
- enables content holders to monitor changes in the preservation environment that can influence their own preservation setup
- provides notification about, for example, format obsolescence, new preservation tools, and policy conformity
Finding out when and how your digital content is at risk is a hard and heavy task to do alone. Many repositories have similar content and are facing similar preservation issues, but they don't have the means to help each other preserve their content and discover synergies in an easy way, beyond informal community interaction.
Scout helps you to:
- discover who else is holding content of a specific type (file format)
- know whether your repository is the only one using a specific preservation tool
- know, for instance, how many organisations use Fedora Commons version 3.4
- be able to reduce risks by community engagement and assistance
- Content holders: academic and national libraries, archives, galleries, museums
- Preservation experts
How can you engage with Scout?
- Access Scout: get access to the community knowledge
- Create a content profile: monitor your collections
- Share your content profile: join the community and discover synergies
- Define your interests: be notified about opportunities and risks
- Faria, Akbik, Sierman, Ras, Ferreira, Ramalho: Automatic preservation watch using information extraction on the Web: a case study on semantic extraction of natural language for digital preservation. In: iPRES 2013, Lisbon, Portugal.
- Kraxner, Plangg, Duretec, Becker, Faria: The SCAPE planning and watch suite: supporting the preservation lifecycle in repositories. In: iPRES 2013, Lisbon, Portugal.
- Faria, Becker, Duretec, Ferreira, Ramalho: Supporting the preservation lifecycle in repositories. In: Open Repositories 2013, Charlottetown, Canada.
- Faria, Petrov, Duretec, Becker, Ferreira, Ramalho: Design and architecture of a novel preservation watch system. In: ICADL 2012, Taipei, Taiwan.
- Becker, Duretec, Petrov, Faria, Ferreira, Ramalho: Preservation Watch: what to monitor and how. In: iPRES 2012, Toronto, Canada.
- This work was partially supported by the SCAPE project. The SCAPE project is co-funded by the European Union under FP7 ICT-2009.4.1 (Grant Agreement number 270137)
- This tool is supported by the Open Planets Foundation. Commercial support is provided by KEEP SOLUTIONS.