Essential reading

An article in IJDL describes the planning approach in detail, explains the workflow and underlying terms, and discusses some case studies. It also includes the specification of the elements of a preservation plan, and a short definition:

A preservation plan defines a series of preservation actions to be taken by a responsible institution due to an identified risk for a given set of digital objects or records (called collection).
The Preservation Plan takes into account the preservation policies, legal obligations, organisational and technical constraints, user requirements and preservation goals and describes the preservation context, the evaluated preservation strategies and the resulting decision for one strategy, including the reasoning for the decision. It also specifies a series of steps or actions (called preservation action plan) along with responsibilities and rules and conditions for execution on the collection. Provided that the actions and their deployment as well as the technical environment allow it, this action plan is an executable workflow definition.

A dlib article discusses experiences in evaluating options for the preservation of scanned newspaper images.

Core concepts

Planning method

Systematic planning for digital preservation: Evaluating potential strategies and building preservation plans.
Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Mark Guttenbrunner, Stephan Strodl, Andreas Rauber, and Hans Hofman.
International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL), December 2009.
[pdf|link|bib]

Plato

Plato: a service-oriented decision support system for preservation planning.
Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Andreas Rauber, Hans Hofman.
In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL'08).
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , June 16-20, 2008.
[pdf|bib]

Preservation Watch

Preservation Watch: What to monitor and how.
Christoph Becker, Kresimir Duretec, Petar Petrov, Luis Faria, Miguel Ferreira and Jose Carlos Ramalho.
9th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2012), Toronto, October 2012.
[pdf|bib]

Planning and watch suite

The SCAPE Planning and Watch suite.
Michael Kraxner, Markus Plangg, Kresimir Duretec, Christoph Becker and Luis Faria.
10th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2013), September 2013, Lisbon, Portugal.
[pdf|poster|bib]

Decision criteria in digital preservation

Decision criteria in digital preservation: What to measure and how.
Christoph Becker and Andreas Rauber.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 2011.
[link|DOI|bib]

Scalability

Scalable Decision Support for Digital Preservation
Christoph Becker, Luis Faria and Kresimir Duretec.
OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, Vol. 30 Iss: 4, 2014
[link]

All publications (chronological)

[journal article] Scalable Decision Support for Digital Preservation: An Assessment
Christoph Becker, Luis Faria and Kresimir Duretec.
OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, Vol. 31 Iss: 1, pp.11 - 34, 2015
[link]
[journal article] Scalable Decision Support for Digital Preservation
Christoph Becker, Luis Faria and Kresimir Duretec.
OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, Vol. 30 Iss: 4, pp.249 - 284, 2014
[link]
[conference] The SCAPE preservation lifecycle
Kresimir Duretec, Michael Kraxner, Artur Kulmukhametov, Markus Plangg, Christoph Becker and Luis Faria
Digital Libraries 2014. London, September 2014
[link]
[conference] The SCAPE Planning and Watch suite.
Michael Kraxner, Markus Plangg, Kresimir Duretec, Christoph Becker and Luis Faria.
10th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2013), September 2013, Lisbon, Portugal.
[pdf|poster|bib]
[conference] Open Preservation Data: Controlled vocabularies and ontologies for preservation ecosystems.
Hannes Kulovits, Michael Kraxner, Markus Plangg, Christoph Becker, Sean Bechhofer.
10th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2013), September 2013, Lisbon, Portugal.
[pdf]
[conference] Improving decision support for software component selection through systematic cross-referencing and analysis of multiple decision criteria.
Christoph Becker, Michael Kraxner, Markus Plangg and Andreas Rauber.
HICSS 2013 Multi-criteria Decision Support, January 2013, Maui, USA.
[pdf]
[conference] Large-scale content profiling for preservation analysis.
Petar Petrov and Christoph Becker.
9th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2012), Toronto, October 2012.
[pdf|bib]
[conference] Preservation Watch: What to monitor and how.
Christoph Becker, Kresimir Duretec, Petar Petrov, Luis Faria, Miguel Ferreira and Jose Carlos Ramalho.
9th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2012), Toronto, October 2012.
[pdf|bib]
[conference] Roles and responsibilities in digital preservation decision making: Towards effective governance.
Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Andreas Rauber.
The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation. Vancouver, September 2012.
[journal article] SCAPE: Big Data meets Digital Preservation.
Ross King, Rainer Schmidt, Christoph Becker, Sven Schlarb.
ERCIM News 89, April 2012.
[pdf|link]
[conference] Impact Assessment of Decision Criteria in Preservation Planning.
Markus Hamm and Christoph Becker.
8th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (IPRES 2011), November 01-04, 2011, Singapore.
[pdf]
[conference] Automated Preservation: The Case of Digital Raw Photographs.
Stephan Bauer and Christoph Becker.
International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL'11). October 2011, Beijing, China.
[pdf]
[conference] Preservation Decisions: Terms and Conditions apply.
Christoph Becker and Andreas Rauber.
ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2011). June 13 - 17, 2011, Ottawa, Canada.
[pdf]
[technical report] Four cases, three solutions: Preservation Plans for Images.
Christoph Becker and Andreas Rauber.
Technical report, Vienna University of Technology, April 2011.
[pdf]
[journal article] Decision criteria in digital preservation: What to measure and how.
Christoph Becker and Andreas Rauber.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 2011.
[link|DOI|bib]
[conference paper] Evaluation of Bit Preservation Strategies.
Eld Zierau, Ulla Bogvad Kejser, Hannes Kulovits.
7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES2010), September 19 - 24, 2010, Vienna, Austria.
[pdf]
[workshop paper] Challenges in preservation (planning).
Christoph Becker.
Dagstuhl Seminar 10291: Automation in Digital Preservation. July 2010
[link]
[journal article] Improving component selection and monitoring with controlled experimentation and automated measurements.
Christoph Becker and Andreas Rauber.
Information and Software Technology, Volume 52, Issue 6, June 2010, Pages 641-655.
[link|PDF (in press version)]
[technical report] PP/4-D5: Planets Planning Tool (version 3).
The last PLANETS report (2010) describes version 3 of Plato.
It provides an overview of the architecture and features and contains some statistics about user accounts and uptake.
[pdf]
[user manual] The updated manual for Plato 3.0 describes how to use the Preservation Planning Tool.
[pdf]
[magazine article] Trustworthy Preservation Planning with Plato.
Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, and Andreas Rauber.
ERCIM News 80, p.24-25, January 2010.
[Issue as PDF|link]
[journal article] Keeping the Game Alive: Evaluating Strategies for the Preservation of Console Video Games.
Mark Guttenbrunner, Christoph Becker and Andreas Rauber.
International Journal of Digital Curation, Vol 5, No 1 (2010)
[link|pdf]
[journal article] Systematic planning for digital preservation: Evaluating potential strategies and building preservation plans.
Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Mark Guttenbrunner, Stephan Strodl, Andreas Rauber, and Hans Hofman.
International Journal on Digital Libraries (IJDL), December 2009.
[paper|link|bib]
[presentation] The following presentation introduces the workflow and contains some lecture notes. It is a run-through of the steps.
[ppt]
[magazine article] From TIFF to JPEG 2000? Preservation Planning at the Bavarian State Library Using a Collection of Digitized 16th Century Printings.
Hannes Kulovits, Andreas Rauber, Anna Kugler, Markus Brantl, Tobias Beinert, and Astrud Schoger.
In: D-Lib Magazine, November/December 2009
D-Lib Magazine,15(2009), 11/12; 9 S.
[link]
[conference paper] Adding quality-awareness to evaluate migration web-services and remote emulation for digital preservation.
Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Michael Kraxner, Riccardo Gottardi, Andreas Rauber, and Randolph Welte.
In: Digital Societies. Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Digital Libraries, ECDL 2009, Corfu, Greece, September 2009. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5714, p. 39-50. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2009.
[pdf]
[journal article] Systematic Characterisation of Objects in Digital Preservation: The eXtensible Characterisation Languages.
Christoph Becker, Andreas Rauber, Volker Heydegger, Jan Schnasse, Manfred Thaller.
Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS), vol 14(18), 2936-2952, 2008.
[link]
[conference paper] Evaluating Strategies for the Preservation of Console Video Games.
Mark Guttenbrunner, Christoph Becker, Andreas Rauber, Carmen Kehrberg.
In: Proceedings of the Fifth international Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2008). London, UK, September 29-30, 2008.
[pdf]
[conference paper] Distributed Preservation Services: Integrating Planning and Actions.
Christoph Becker, Miguel Ferreira, Michael Kraxner, Andreas Rauber, Ana Alice Baptista, José Carlos Ramalho.
In: Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL'08). Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5173, p. 25-36. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2008.
[pdf]
[conference paper] Plato: a service-oriented decision support system for preservation planning.
Christoph Becker, Hannes Kulovits, Andreas Rauber, Hans Hofman.
In: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL'08).
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania , June 16-20, 2008.
[pdf|bib]
[technical report] PP/4-D3 Report on service integration in Plato 2.
This report, a PLANETS deliverable from 2008, describes how Planets services were to be integrated into successive releases of Plato, and includes a roadmap for this integration.
[pdf]
[conference paper] A Generic XML Language for Characterising Objects to Support Digital Preservation.
Christoph Becker, Andreas Rauber, Volker Heydegger, Jan Schnasse, Manfred Thaller.
In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'08), Track 'Document Engineering'.
Fortaleza, Brazil, March 16-20, 2008.
[pdf]
[conference paper] Preserving Interactive Multimedia Art: A Case Study in Preservation Planning.
Christoph Becker, Günther Kolar, Josef Küng, Andreas Rauber.
In: Asian Digital Libraries. Looking Back 10 Years and Forging New Frontiers. Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL'07). Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4822, p. 257-266. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2007.
[pdf]
[conference paper] Long-Term Preservation of Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Case Study in Preservation Planning.
Christoph Becker, Stephan Strodl, Robert Neumayer, Andreas Rauber, Eleonora Nicchiarelli Bettelli, Max Kaiser.
In: Proceedings of the Ninth Russian National Research Conference on Digital Libraries: Advanced Methods and Technologies, Digital Collections (RCDL'07).
Pereslavl, Russia, October 15-18, 2007.
[pdf]
[technical report] PP/4-D1 Report on methodology for specifying preservation plans
This first PLANETS report described the workflow that formed the basis of the first release of the planning tool.
[pdf]
[conference paper] How to Choose a Digital Preservation Strategy: Evaluating a Preservation Planning Procedure.
Stephan Strodl, Christoph Becker, Robert Neumayer, Andreas Rauber.
In: Proceedings of the ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL'07),
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 18-23, 2007
[pdf]
[conference paper] The DELOS Testbed for Choosing a Digital Preservation Strategy
Stephan Strodl, Carl Rauch, Andreas Rauber, Hans Hofman, Franca Debole, Giuseppe Amato
In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries,
Kyoto, Japan, November 27-30, 2006
[pdf]
[workshop paper] Evaluating preservation strategies for audio and video files
Carl Rauch, Franz Pavuza , Stephan Strodl, and Andreas Rauber
In: Proceedings of the DELOS Workshop on Digital Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services,
May 11-13, 2005, Heraklion, Greece.
[pdf]