Archival Introspection and Maintenance Metadata

随着数字图书馆的规模达到pb级，并保存数据数十年，它们管理的信息变得容易受到设备故障和管理错误的影响，例如在数据迁移或备份和恢复期间。此类数据丢失事件对用户群体来说是无法检测到的，因为信息的数量和生命周期决定了许多数据很少或从未被访问过。该项目满足了对能够审计数据存储库以确保正确保存信息的软件的关键需求。正在开发的软件允许数字图书馆评估跨多个外部数据存储库的当前馆藏的保存状态。一种新的可证明数据占有（PDP）技术允许存档提供密码学上强有力的证据，证明它保留了用户社区最初存储的确切数据。PDP将从根本上改变远程站点审计数据的性能。它允许服务器在不向用户返回数据的情况下证明占有。该项目组建了一个计算机科学家和数字图书馆员团队，为国家科学数字图书馆（NSDL）开发软件工具。利用NSDL技术，该团队正在建立虚拟天文台（VO）天文学档案：一个多机构合作的档案，探索图书馆对大型科学数据集和相关信息的管理，如衍生结果、出版物和教育工具。VO档案被用作评估可证明数据占有的试验台。

As digital libraries reach petabytes in size and hold data for decades, the information that they manage becomes vulnerable to data loss from device failures and administration errors, e.g. during data migration or backup and restore. Such data loss incidents are undetectable to the user community, because the volume and lifetime of information dictates that much data are accessed infrequently or never. This project is filling a critical need for software that enables the auditing of data repositories to ensure that information is being preserved correctly. The software being developed allows digital libraries to evaluate the preservation state of current holdings across multiple, external data repositories. A new Provable Data Possession (PDP) technology allows an archive to provide cryptographically-strong evidence that it retains the exact data that were originally stored by the user community. PDP will radically change the performance of auditing data at remote sites. It allows the server to prove possession without returning data to the user. The project assembles a team of computer scientists and digital librarians developing software tools for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Using NSDL technologies, the team is building the Virtual Observatory (VO) Astronomy archive: a multi-institution, collaborative archive that is exploring the curation by Libraries of large scientific datasets and associated information, such as derived results, publications, and educational tools. The VO archive is being used as a testbed for the evaluation of Provable Data Possession.