Preservica V5.10 Active Digital Preservation and Access Platform

Digital preservation specialist Preservica Ltd. announced the v5.10 of its active digital preservation and access platform.

The fully supported and maintained single platform is available across company’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise portfolio including Cloud Edition Essentials, Cloud Edition Professional and Enterprise Private Cloud.

Shaped by user group priorities and the company newly formed digital preservation Innovation team headed by Jon Tilbury, CTO, the version v5.10 builds on a roadmap designed to enable culture and heritage, government and business organizations to create dynamic, living archives and empower digital archivist and collection managers to achieve more.

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Working with customers, the expert engineering team has delivered new features which include bulk metadata editing adding to the firm’s flexible ‘drag and drop’ collection management, to simplify updating and enriching descriptions across an entire collection or changing classifications of records (e.g. for GDPR).

This version also adds over 75 file format migration pathways based on extensive digital preservation research by the innovation team. The pathways add to the hundreds already included with Preservica and increase preservation action choices for a range of image, audio/visual and open document formats.

The team has also contributed to the extended R/W APIs – a component in simplifying the automated acquisition of content from other systems. Future research plans for the team include working with the firm’s users and the wider community to progress digital preservation, such as new ways of sharing recommended preservation actions across the community, and the use of emerging technologies like blockchain and content classification using AI and machine learning.

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Features in v5.10 include:

• Active digital preservation: over 75 additional file format migration pathways. The latest choices for preservation and file migrations with recent tool versions including JHOVE 1.20 and DROID v6.3. New migration pathways include Real Media to MP4; CSV to ODS for open document spreadsheet preservation and presentation; presentation migrations to Web Ready MP4; migrations to TIFF for camera RAW formats; and migrations to JPEG for scientific research formats such as FITS and VICAR.

• Living archive and flexible collection management: The bulk metadata editor includes options for simplifying the updating, replacing, clearing and adding of descriptions to multiple records. User-defined white and blacklists make it to permit or prevent bulk changes to specified fields. Distributing preserved content with associated records of provenance is simplified with Dissemination Information Packages (DIPs) extended to include the audit history. Users of metadata harvesting have greater knowledge of collection changes with file-level extensions to the OAI-PMH interface.

• API extensions: Enterprise and Cloud Edition Professional users have possibilities for integrating Preservica with existing organization applications. The extended REST API for content and metadata aligns with the solution’s living archive focus, enabling the programmatic upload of files and reorganizing of collection hierarchies in Preservica.

• Storage flexibility: Enterprise on-premise customers can now choose from a range of storage options with a generic S3 storage adaptor, compatible with many local and cloud storage solutions beyond Amazon Web Services.

• GDPR enhancements: Pre-defined metadata elements relating to personal data enable clear classification of information while dashboard or on-demand reports show the types of pre-classified personal data held within the firm’s solution. Security of processing is enhanced with the addition of two-factor authentication.

Jon Tilbury, CTO, Preservica, adds: “I am really pleased to see our Innovation Team contributing to both the needs of today’s Preservica users as well as collaborating with the wider community to help shape the future of advanced digital preservation. Our vision is to empower digital archivist and collection managers to achieve more and excel in their roles by making active digital preservation business as usual, seamlessly integrated with the systems that manage and protect our most valuable digital information.“

Preservica v5.10 will be released to all customers in July 2018.

Resources:
v5.10 live demo special
Webinar briefing on Preservica v5.10 on user portal.

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2018.04.10 | Press Release