CHAPEL HILL, NC – will our grandchildren understand the dramatic events of the 2008 U.S. presidential election if they can’t access the rich digital information that documented – and, arguably, influenced – the process?
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure recently awarded nearly $1 million to the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to address this challenge.
The National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype (TPAP) project is addressing key challenges in safeguarding, preserving and providing access to authentic electronic records as the nation’s information becomes increasingly digital.
“The goal is to identify the basic preservation rules and procedures that automate the management of authentic archives over decades or longer,” said Reagan Moore, Ph.D., a school professor and principal investigator of the research project. “The TPAP project is developing a reference implementation for preservation environments that can be used as a starter kit.”
iRODS’ rules-enabled automation is essential for the TPAP prototype to be able to preserve, validate and provide long-term access to mushrooming collections of digital data as they grow to petabytes in size and hundreds of millions of files. A petabyte is one million gigabytes, or about 100 years of a standard television signal.
For example, iRODS can enforce retention and disposition policies for each file that is registered and check whether the policies have changed over time.
“The ultimate goal is to have an archive that cleans up after itself,” said Richard Marciano, Ph.D., school professor and co-principal investigator.
“The iRODs middleware allows you to specify the management policy for the archives or repository and turn these specifications into a set of rules, without having to change the iRODS code.
“This allows easy customization of how the archives behave, creating a system that is self-managed based on rules that can be individualized for each organization and users.”
As a test-bed for preserving electronic records collections from NARA that must be maintained for what it calls the life of the republic, the TPAP project includes six partners nationwide: the school; the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI, based at UNC, Duke and N.C. State universities, and with the state of North Carolina); the University of Maryland; an arm of NARA in Rocket Center, W.Va.; the University of California, San Diego; and Georgia Tech.
Online: http://diceresearch.org; http://sils.unc.edu
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