Archiving in the networked world: metrics for testing
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07378831111174486 |
| Pages | 557-564 |
| Date | 06 September 2011 |
| Published date | 06 September 2011 |
| Author | Michael Seadle |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Archiving in the networked
world: metrics for testing
Michael Seadle
Humboldt-Universita
¨t zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Purpose – This paper aims to focus on how long-term digital archiving systems are tested and what
benchmarks and other metrics are necessary for that testing to produce data that the community can
use to make decisions.
Design/methodology/approach – The article reviews recent literature about digital archiving
systems involving public and semi-public tests. It then looks specifically at the rules and metrics
needed for doing public or semi-public testing for three specific issues: triggering migration; ingest
rates; and storage capacity measurement.
Findings – Important literature on testing exists but common metrics do not, and too few data are
available at this point to establish them reliably. Metrics are needed to judge the quality and timeliness
of an archive’s migration services. Archives should offer benchmarks for the speed of ingest, but that
will happen only once they come to agreement about starting and ending points. Storage capacity is
another area where librarians are raising questions, but without proxy measures and agreement about
data amounts, such testing cannot proceed.
Practical implications – Testing is necessary to develop useful metrics and benchmarks about
performance. At present the archiving community has too little data on which to make decisions about
long term digital archiving, and as long as that is the case, the decisions may well be flawed.
Originality/value – The article shows that testing is key to making rational decisions about digital
long term archiving systems but establishing metrics and rules by which librarians can compare the
results is far from easy.
Keywords Archives, Digitalstorage, Classification, Decisionmaking, Information management
Paper type General review
Introduction
Is testing a binary function – i.e. a system works or not – or a set of benchmarks or a
continuous performance curve? Participants at the Aligning National Approaches to
Digital Preservation (ANADP) conference[1] in Tallinn, Estonia, 23-25 May 2011,
agreed that the binary approach was too simplistic. The fact that a program will
compile and run against a sample set of data does not mean that it works in any
meaningful way. Of course all publicly available archiving and preservation systems
have undergone more extensive testing than that, but no one at the conference had a
clear notion of what metrics should apply to make it possible to compare the
effectiveness of one system with another. Nonetheless conference participants
(including vendors) generally agreed that the digital archiving community needs to
develop benchmarking and other forms of measurement to enable a fair and open
comparison and to make it possible for libraries and other cultural heritage institutions
to make rational choices for long-term digital preservation.
This article builds on discussions that took place at the ANADP conference. Testing
was a major leitmotiv on the technical alignment panel, which I chaired, and
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
Archiving in the
networked world
557
Received June 2011
Revised June 2011
Accepted June 2011
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 29 No. 3, 2011
pp. 557-564
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/07378831111174486
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