title: CONNECTING PRESERVATION PLANNING AND PLATO WITH  DIGITAL REPOSITORY INTERFACES
creators: Steve Hitchcock Andreas Rauber Hannes Kulovits David Tarrant Les Carr
abstract: An accepted digital preservation workflow is emerging in
  which file formats are identified and those believed to be
  at risk are migrated to what are perceived to be less risky
  formats. This raises important questions about what to
  convert and when, if at all. In other words, how to connect
  file identification and migration. This area has become
  known as preservation planning, and seeks to take
  account of a wide variety of factors that might impact
  preservation decisions. Broadly there are two approaches
  to preservation planning. One provided in some digital
  preservation systems is to simplify and reduce both the
  number of file formats stored and therefore limit the number
  of preservation tools needed based on accepted recommendations.
  A more thorough, flexible and possibly
  complex approach, supported by the Plato preservation
  planning tool developed by the Planets project, allows decisions
  on preservation actions to combine analysis of the
  characteristics of different file formats with specific local
  requirements, such as costs and resources. This paper
  shows how Plato can be integrated with digital repository
  software, in this case EPrints, to enable this powerful approach
  to be used effectively to manage content in repositories
  of different sizes and with varying degrees of preservation
  expertise and support. These tools are accessed via
  a common repository interface to enable repository managers,
  and others who do not specialise in preservation, to
  moderate decisions on preservation planning and to control
  preservation actions.