Library of Congress Archive Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT) Final Report

This report documents the development, administration and conclusions from the Archive Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT), a multiparty test of various digital preservation regimes, conducted under the auspices of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). It describes the genesis of NDIIPP and of the AIHT under the direction of the Library of Congress; details the phases of the AIHT, documents lessons learned during the test and suggests possible fruitful areas of future work. This section of the report covers the background of the NDIIPP project in general and the design of the AIHT. Section 2 is an executive summary of the three main phases of the test-ingest and markup of a digital archive; export and sharing of that same digital archive from the tested preservation regimes; and conversion of digital objects from one format to another. It also includes observations made in the start-up phase, prior to the official start of the AIHT; overall descriptions of the lessons learned; and suggests future areas of work on some of the issues uncovered in the test. Sections 3-6 are the principal contents of the report, being the final reports of the participating institutions: Harvard, testing the Harvard Digital Repository; Johns Hopkins, testing both DSpace and Fedora; Old Dominion University, designing "self-archiving objects" based on Fedora; and Stanford, testing the Stanford Digital Repository. These reports contain the description and insights from the four institutions conducting the test and include observations specific to those institutions and preservation regimes. 1 There is a considerable amount of detail in the participant reports, but there are three significant messages that have come through from this work and which we believe point to valuable areas of future investigation: validation of shared effort, a need for regular, comparative testing, and work to reduce the cost of sharing the preservation burden. The AIHT was created with the idea that the problem of digital preservation was really a complex of problems, strongly affected by the content being preserved, the audience for whom it was being preserved, and the institution doing the preserving. As a corollary, the AIHT (and indeed all the work of NDIIPP) is being conducted with the idea that large-scale digital preservation will require continuing participation of many entities. The AIHT was designed in part to test this hypothesis of shared value. By designing a test in which the participants exported files to one another, we …