Case studies

Our planning approach and the tool Plato have been applied by a number of institutions across Europe. A first round of case studies led to refinements and extensions of the planning procedure and the definition of the preservation plan as it is implemented now. On this page, we shortly present some of the case studies and their results. Some of these case studies have been published, so for detailed information please refer to the documentation page where the corresponding publications are listed.

Lessons learned

A number of articles analyse the experience gained in case studies:

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]

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.
DOI: 10.1002/asi.21527

Four cases, three solutions: Preservation Plans for Images.
Christoph Becker and Andreas Rauber.
Technical report, Vienna University of Technology, April 2011.
[pdf]

Some examples

We are continuously performing or advising further case studies in diverse areas. Please contact us if you are interested in advice or collaboration on evaluation and planning! Most of the requirements trees of the case studies listed here are available within the fragments library of the planning tool.

Scanned images: Three cases, three solutions.

We have been carrying out three related case studies with three different institutions across Europe in this domain. Starting at different outsets, the analysis arrived at specific recommendation advices on how to proceed in each situation.

  • One case study was carried out with the British Library and focused on a collection of 2 million images in TIFF-5 format with a size of about 40MB per image. The images were scanned from old newspaper pages.
  • A second case study was done with the State and University Library Denmark and analysed a collection of scanned pages from a series of yearbooks, where the masters were in GIF format.
  • The third case study was done in cooperation with the Bavarian State Library. The task was to preserve a collection of digitized 16th century printings and specifically to analyse the benefits and drawbacks of migration from TIFF to JPEG2000 with currently available tools. This article in the D-Lib Magazine reports on the findings.
You can learn more here:

Video Games

This case study investigates the digital preservation of console video games and has been conducted in the course of a diploma thesis.

  • The corresponding thesis can be found here.
  • A generated report describing the completed planning procedure for Nintendo SNES alternatives (one of the experiments in the thesis) is available here.
  • The requirements tree is available as image and in Freemind format.
  • You can also download the complete planning project, upload it to a Plato instance and change it at your free will, from here.

Interactive Multimedia Art

This case study presents the findings of a pilot project for investigating approaches for preserving born-digital interactive multimedia art which was conducted together ith the Ars Electronica. The study focused on the significant properties of a collection of interactive multimedia art pieces.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations.

This early case study investigated different preservation strategies for electronic publications, it has been conducted in cooperation with the Austrian National Library in 2006.

Bitstream Preservation of Digital Photographs

This case study investigates the preservation needs of different user groups in the field of digital photography.

  • The following page (in german) gives an overview of the findings of the case study, including the requirements tree and an extensive report.
    [Results (in german)]

A few other case studies can be found on the documentation page.