Prepare to Preserve: the Harvest Combine for Research Data at Stockholm University and the Systems Inventory
Joakim Philipson
In the absence yet of a digital archive compliant with the OAIS model requirements Stockholm University (SU) is nevertheless continually developing a "Harvest Combine" tool for transformation of metadata and data files from data repositories that are used by SU researchers such as Figshare, Datadryad and Zenodo. The metadata are collected from these repositories, enriched with metadata from other sources, and then transformed to accord with the Swedish National Archives recent implementation (aka FGS 2.0) of the European Common Specification for Information Packages (E-ARK CSIP) and Specification for Submission Information Packages (E-ARK SIP) versions 2.1.0. The metadata records are then stored in the SU local (temporal) archive together with the associated data files harvested simultaneously. Part of the motivation for this preparatory digital preservation work are the perceived risks of trusting the digital preservation of research data files produced by SU reseachers to external repositories, that we do not fully control locally. The end product of this harvest and transformation processing are SIPs (Submission Information Packages), still awaiting future transformation to AIPs (Archival Information Packages) and eventually DIPs (Dissemination Information Packages). The associated data files are not transformed or converted in this first step towards long-term preservation and archiving, but we keep track of the file formats ingested partly by mapping file extensions to mimetypes in a special registry xml-file, used in the transformation processing and continuously updated whenever "new" file formats are encountered for the first time.

The software scripts that were developed for this "harvester combine" are in BASH Unix Shell, XQuery and XSLT. The processing of metadata, data and scripts occurs locally using Git Bash (for Windows), BaseX and Oxygen XML editor, but is essentially software-tool agnostic. Metadata input sources are e.g. OAI-PMH feeds (Datacite or METS), repository specific APIs (to get necessary file metadata) or generic command line scripts (for checksums and file sizes in some cases). Only recently we have also created a cross-sectional Digital Preservation Group at Stockholm University Library, whose first task is to create an inventory of all (external or internal) source informations systems (e.g. data repositories), together with their local destination archival or storage systems. This inventory is then aimed to serve as a basis for a digital preservation plan for future long-term preservation.
approaches to preservation start 2 preserve