A practical guide to implementing the DCC testbed methodology

Abstract

The Digital Curation Centre is committed to advancing knowledge in digital preservation. As digital preservation is a young discipline many of its methods are untested. The testbed methodology developed by DCC researchers will allow practitioners to validate preservation approaches, thereby ensuring digital assets remain usable well into the future. The DCC methodology builds on existing work. It complements the Dutch, DELOS and Planets testbed methodologies by extending evaluation to consider use cases. Curation activities cannot be evaluated independent of context. To truly understand the usefulness of different preservation approaches we must consider more than simply the technical verisimilitude. Performing validation against user needs to ensure required functionality is not lost as opposed to simply comparing the bits, will provide a more accurate evaluation of the success of different approaches.