Experiment, Document & Decide: a Collaborative Approach to Preservation Planning at the BnF

Abstract : The National Library of France (BnF) has recently implemented a new module for its Scalable Preservation and Archiving Repository (SPAR) to set up preservation strategies based on formats, agents, workflows, tools and tests, and managed asreference packages in the Archive. This module aims to fulfill an objective: for SPAR to be fully self-documented. Formats, agents and workflows are formally described and preserved along with the Information packages in which such elements are involved. Although this was a feature that was included from the beginnings of SPAR, the new Preservation Planning module aims to provide a tool that can more easily build these reference packages and that will more closely involve domain experts and the IT department in the processes of preservation planning. But the main innovation lies in the documentation of decisions that directed their selection as standards in SPAR: test data are now preserved as a new kind of reference package.