Titans in the Library: Prometheus Unbinds At-risk Data
The Prometheus job interface (click image
to enlarge)
Library developer Snezana Mihajlovic uses a
customised mini-jukebox attached to a standard Library workstation
Photo: Douglas Elford, National Library
The Problem
The National Library of Australia has a relatively small but important collection of digital material stored on physical media carriers such as floppy disks, CDs and DVDs. This includes both published material and unpublished manuscripts in digital form. To date, preservation of the Library’s physical format digital collection has been taken care of manually, on a case-by-case basis, but this approach is insufficient to deal effectively with the total volume of incoming material requiring preservation. The Library collects digital material through multiple acquisition streams and generally has little control over the physical format in which the material arrives. So, while most items fall into a small number of widely used carrier types, any long-term solution has to make provision for almost any kind of carrier.
The Solution
To ensure access to digital content on the most common physical media carriers within the Library, the Digital Preservation Workflow Project produced an application called Prometheus, which provides a semi-automated, scalable process for transferring data from physical media carriers to preservation-managed digital storage. This is helping the Library to mitigate the major risks associated with storing the content on physical carriers: deterioration of the media and obsolescence of the technology required to access them. Prometheus makes it easier to process the majority of common physical carriers and collect and manage information about the content. It also provides mechanisms to accommodate special cases and less common media types.
The Prometheus system allows Library staff to link to catalogue records, create an accurate duplicate of the digital content and transfer it to preservation-managed digital storage. Attaching a customisable ‘mini-jukebox’ to a staff member’s standard workstation allows the accurate duplication of content from USB thumb drives or memory cards, 3½ inch floppy disks, CDs, and DVDs. Specialist services using Prometheus can deal with media types that fall outside this range, such as 5¼ inch floppy disks, SyQuest disks and hard drives. Once the content is copied from the media, integrity and virus checking is conducted and as much metadata as possible is harvested. Not only will this help in resource discovery, but it will allow the Library to manage the content which has been transferred off these problematic and sometimes idiosyncratic carriers for long-term preservation.
The system incorporates a range of open source tools to undertake processing, including media imaging, file identification and metadata extraction. These tools are deployed using Java-based Web services. Moreover, Prometheus has been designed in a modular way, so that as new tools and services become available they can be easily upgraded or replaced.
The Software Released
The software is released under the GNU General Public License V3.0, and the latest version and documentation is available from the project website (http://prometheus-digi.sourceforge.net). A paper presented on this project at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Quebec City, Canada, in August can be found at www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/papers/084-Webb-en.pdf.
David Pearson
Manager, Digital Preservation Section



