Assessing digital preservation infrastructures: implementing a framework for library, engineering and eScience organisations

Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg (SHAMAN) is an EC-funded project, which focuses on the development of an integrated preservation framework. Through grid technologies, the SHAMAN framework promotes a distributed approach in preservation systems, whereby ingest, persistent storage, access, presentation and manipulation of digital information is managed for long-term consumption. In order to understand the ever-evolving requirements for functionality in information systems, the SHAMAN team conducted an in-depth investigation of user needs for preservation solutions. The results were used to inform the development of a corresponding assessment framework. The purpose of the assessment framework is to evaluate the degree that the SHAMAN outputs are consistent with the identified user requirements and to measure the overall success of the project. The SHAMAN outputs are instantiated as functional prototypes that reflect preservation requirements in three distinct domains: memory institutions, industrial design & engineering and e-Science. Following the specifications of the assessment framework, the software artefacts produced by SHAMAN for each prototype must be assessed to validate their conformance with user and system requirements. To this end, a software validation methodology has been devised, which builds on the SHAMAN assessment framework to verify that the SHAMAN software satisfies the reasons for its development. This paper documents the SHAMAN assessment framework and explicates the relationship between assessment and software validation in the SHAMAN project