The Archive Ingest and Handling Test: The Johns Hopkins Universi... http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december05/choudhury/12choudhury.html 1 of 8 2/17/08 11:03 PM Search | Back Issues | Author Index | Title Index | Contents D-Lib Magazine December 2005 Volume 11 Number 12 ISSN 1082-9873 The Archive Ingest and Handling Test The Johns Hopkins University Report Tim DiLauro , Mark Patton , David Reynolds , and G. Sayeed Choudhury The Johns Hopkins University {timmo, mpatton, davidr}sayeed@jhu.edu Introduction From very early in its existence, the Digital Knowledge Center (DKC) in the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has focused on using automated and semi-automated processes to create workflows for the creation and ingestion of digital objects. What was missing was a place to put these objects, a standard way to put them there, and a way to preserve them. This has begun to change over the past two years. After participating in a series of workshops and meetings related to the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservations Program (NDIIPP), we noted an emphasis on the aforementioned missing elements. When the Library of Congress (LC) announced the Archive Ingest and Handling Test (AIHT) as part of the NDIIPP, JHU saw participation as an opportunity to pursue several areas of interest. Primary among these was the evaluation of content repositories as platforms for digital preservation. We have been concerned for some time that many in the digital library community conflate the storage of digital objects in a repository with the preservation of those objects. Participating in this test would give us an opportunity to experiment with repositories and digital preservation. JHU became especially interested in validating a level of activity that could be described as a necessary, minimal level of digital preservation. JHU was already experimenting with Fedora and had tested ingestion of content into DSpace. The opportunity to get more hands-on experience with the facilities of these two open source efforts was an additional motivator. At a higher level, though, we were even more interested in the possibility of implementing a layer of abstraction (an application programming interface or API) over existing repository applications. Such an abstraction would allow other applications to interact with at least some facilities of a repository without knowing with which repository application (e.g., DSpace, Fedora) it is interacting. The AIHT gave us an opportunity to test the feasibility of constructing such a layer and to determine the ease with which such a layer could be applied in practice. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we are conducting a technology analysis of repositories and services to continue and build on this work. More information is available on our project wiki. 1