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This paper is an extended and updated version of the work reported at iPres 2008. Digital preservation activities can only succeed if they go beyond the technical properties of digital objects. They must consider the strategy, policy, goals, and constraints of the institution that undertakes them and take into account the cultural and institutional framework in which data, documents and records are preserved. Furthermore, because organizations differ in many ways, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be appropriate. Fortunately, organizations involved in digital preservation have created documents describing their policies, strategies, work-flows, plans, and goals to provide guidance. They also have skilled staff who are aware of sometimes unwritten considerations. Within Planets (Farquhar & Hockx-Yu, 2007), a four-year project co-funded by the European Union to address core digital preservation challenges, we have analyzed preservation guiding documents and interviewed staff from libraries, archives, and data centres that are actively engaged in digital preservation. This paper introduces a conceptual model for expressing the core concepts and requirements that appear in preservation guiding documents. It defines a specific vocabulary that institutions can reuse for expressing their own policies and strategies. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, the model and vocabulary support automated preservation planning tools through an XML representation.

Digital preservation activities can only succeed if they go beyond the technical properties of digital objects. They must consider the strategy, policy, goals, and constraints of the institution that undertakes them and take into account the cultural and institutional framework in which data, documents and records are preserved. Furthermore, because organizations differ in many ways, a one-sizefits-all approach cannot be appropriate. Fortunately, organizations involved in digital preservation have created documents describing their policies, strategies, workflows, plans, and goals to provide guidance. They also have skilled staff who are aware of sometimes unwritten considerations. Within Planets [Farquhar 2007], a four-year project cofunded by the European Union to address core digital preservation challenges, we have analyzed preservation guiding documents and interviewed staff from libraries, archives, and data centers that are actively engaged in digital preservation. This paper introduces a conceptual model for expressing the core concepts and requirements that appear in preservation guiding documents. It defines a specific vocabulary that institutions can reuse for expressing their own policies and strategies. In addition to providing a conceptual framework, the model and vocabulary support automated preservation planning tools through an XML representation.

Awareness of the need to provide digital preservation solutions is spreading from the core memory institutions to other domains, including government, industry, SME and consumers. In many of these settings we are, however, faced with preserving more than just data. In the domain of eScience, for example, investigations are increasingly collaborative. Most scientific and engineering domains benefit from building on the outputs of other research by sharing information to reason over and data to incorporate in the modeling task at hand. This raises the need for preserving and sharing entire eScience workflows and processes for later reuse. We need to define which information is to be collected, create means to preserve it and approaches to enable and validate the re-execution of a preserved process. This includes and goes beyond preserving the data used in the experiments, as the process underlying its creation and use is essential. The TIMBUS project and Wf4Ever project team up for this halfday tutorial to provide an introduction to the problem domain and discuss solutions for the curation of eScience processes.