Zenodo: Preservation Meter

Project Specification

The aim of this openlab summer student project is to enhance ZENODO digital repository service with several preservation-oriented features, such as preservation meter and badge to indicate the suitability of a document for long-term reservation. The project will be developed in the Python programming language, using Flask/HTML5/jQuery/TwitterBootstrap technologies for the user interface and SQLAlchemy/MySQL for persistence.

Abstract

Digital Preservation consists mainly in storing digital information, mostly digital-born content, and making sure that it remains available and accessible in the future. This tasks has many challenges such as making sure that the files are in a known and acessible format, that they are not corrupt, lost or unretrievable. The digital preservation challenges apply, noticeably, on digital repositories such as Zenodo. Zenodo aims to provide a secure and trusty way of storing data for the long tail of science. This is to say, storing and connecting information that is normaly not available on the main publications, such as the used datasets for a given study or the produced software for a specfic paper. The goal of this work was to develop a Preservation Meter that allowed the users to know how suitable the files on their submited records are in terms of preservation.This was accomplished by using a simple and intuitive visual representation of such suitability by means of a progress bar, where a completly filled bar means the file is very likely to be well preserved. The overall goals of the project were completed and the implementation of this work was integrated on the Zenodo repository as a plugin.