The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) has suggested the need for digital preservation repositories to perform periodic “health checks” as a routine part of their preservation activities. In the same way that doctors monitor basic health properties of their patients to spot indications of infirmity, repositories should monitor a set of properties associated with “preservation health” to provide an early warning of potential threats to the ongoing security of the archived digital objects in their care. The Preservation Health Check (PHC) project, undertaken as a joint effort by OPF and OCLC Research, aims to evaluate the usefulness of the preservation metadata created and maintained by operational repositories for assessing basic preservation properties. The PHC project seeks to develop an implementable logic to support preservation health checks of this kind, and to test this logic against the store of preservation metadata maintained by an operational preservation repository. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has agreed to share their preservation metadata in support of this project. The authors aim is to advance the use of preservation metadata as an evidence base for conducting preservation health checks according to a standardized, widely-applicable protocol. Doing so opens up possibilities for internal or third-party threat assessment services …

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded Chronicles in Preservation project (http://metaarchive.org/neh/) completed this Comparative Analysis of three Distributed Digital Preservation systems to analyze their underlying technologies and methodologies: -Chronopolis using iRODS (http://chronopolis.sdsc.edu/). -University of North Texas using Coda (http://www.library.unt.edu/). -MetaArchive Cooperative using LOCKSS (http://metaarchive.org/). This Comparative Analysis is not intended to designate any of the Distributed Digital Preservation (DDP) systems as superior or inferior to one another in any of the areas disclosed. On the contrary, digital preservation is often best served by maintaining a variety of solutions, and each of the three DDP systems have partnered actively with one another on several digital preservation initiatives and are learning constantly from one another’s approaches. The Chronicles in Preservation project, and more specifically, this Comparative Analysis, has been undertaken by these three systems in order to test, document, and refine their processes, not in isolation, but as a collaborative effort.