PAR (Preservation Action Registries)

Overview: Digital preservation systems generally lack a common and consistent way to describe and execute preservation policies and actions. For example, Archivematica’s Format Policy Register (FPR) and Preservica’s Linked Data Registry (LDR) both define what tools and rules to use, but they are not interoperable. Technical information cannot be shared between the two solutions and users are unable to share their experience regarding what approaches to use in different contexts. The PAR project aims to address this by capturing and sharing good practice for the preservation of digital objects.

With the initial phase completed, we are keen to hear from digital preservation System Suppliers, Technical and Community contributors who are interested in and would like to GET INVOLVED with the next stage of PAR. Technical coding contribution is sought across all of the areas including the implementation of API endpoints for own registries. Other contributors are needed to help define user examples as well as identify funders and sources.

Current Status: Artefactual, Arkivum, Preservica, Open Preservation Foundation have completed the initial work phase which was kindly funded by Jisc’s Research data shared service initiative. PAR aims to capture and share technical good practice for the preservation of digital objects in the form of a registry of machine-readable recommendations. The registry’s data model defines the tools that can be used for different digital object formats, the properties that can be extracted or measured and the preservation actions that can be taken. The model includes contextual information including the reasons why recommendations are being given. The information is versioned and includes the tool parameters as well as the software environments needed to execute different preservation actions so they are directly invokable by preservation systems. More details about the project can be found in this paper and in the iPRES presentation.

The initial phase culminated in the development of an API, a schema, based upon a conceptual model and a working proof of concept allowing the description of a preservation action for a given file format to be exchanged between two different and incompatible action registries. A demonstration of progress to date can be viewed at https://youtu.be/ELjbgksjBmU.

PAR Going Forward: The future of  PAR will be outlined at the upcoming PASIG conference in February 2019. The technical components of the next work stages can be broken down into four main areas:

  • PAR model updates   
  • API updates
  • Development of a synchronisation tool to compare registries and transfer information between them.
  • Proprietary system updates to Preservica and Archivematica systems to implement the PAR API

Other PAR Sources:

Github repoh

DPC blog post

Project announcement and contacts

Project pages