Volume 11 Number 12
ISSN 1082-9873
Five Views of the Archive, Ingest and Handling Test
In this issue of D-Lib Magazine there are five articles about the Archiving, Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT), a project sponsored by the Library of Congress under the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP).
The AIHT began with the transfer of a digital archive donated by George Mason University to the Library of Congress. Following the transfer, the AIHT was composed of three phases of work that each of four participating institutions performed:
- Phase I. Ingest of the archive from the Library of Congress
- Phase II. Export the archive to another participating institution and then re-import it
- Phase III. Migrate content from one format to another
The four participating institutions were Harvard University, The Johns Hopkins University, Old Dominion University, and Stanford University.
The first article about the AIHT in this issue of D-Lib is by Clay Shirky, New York University, and it provides background, an overview of the project, and general conclusions applicable to many institutions involved in or planning digital preservation projects. The next article is from Harvard University and describes the opportunity provided by the AIHT for Harvard to investigate issues that will arise as its preservation repository, the Harvard University Library Digital Repository Service, moves toward becoming an institutional repository. The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) article describes the AIHT in relation to JHU's Digital Knowledge Center (DKC) in the Sheridan Libraries. JHU saw the AIHT as an opportunity to evaluate "content repositories as platforms for digital preservation." Because Old Dominion University (ODU) was the only non-library AIHT participant, ODU chose to focus on alternative archiving concepts, and the ODU article reports on those concepts and also discusses the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language complex object format. Rather than repeat information in the project final report that will be available from the Library of Congress later this year, the authors of the Stanford University article here describe the methodology Stanford developed and implemented as part of their participation in the AIHT.
Each of the five articles about the AIHT provides a unique view of the project, and it is recommended that you read all five to get a broader picture of the issues that can arise for those engaging in digital preservation projects.
Bonita Wilson
Editor
Copyright© 2005 Corporation for National Research Initiatives
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