Prometheus - Digital Preservation Workbench Reference Guide

Overview

The Digital Preservation Workbench (DPW) allows Library staff to associate Digital Preservation holdings to Catalogue Bibliographic records in a semi-automated, scalable process which includes transferring data from physical carriers [e.g. CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs] to the Digital Preservation area of the NLA's digital mass storage system, helping to mitigate the major risks associated with the physical carriers: deterioration of the media and obsolescence of the technology required to access them for collection items.

Digital Preservation Workbench information for a work includes:

  • Catalogue Bibliographic Record number

  • Associated Copyright status

  • An Associated physical Holdings number

  • Associated Notes and Metadata, Part Name, Part Annotations and Arrangements

  • Physical carrier identification information

  • Job Number

  • Job Name

  • Digital Manifest from Captured Files

  • Digital Preservation metadata

The DPW is accessed by logging in to the Digital Preservation Workbench (DPW). You can search for Jobs and their associated catalogue records in DPW as usual, and view their Status information by clicking on the 'My Jobs' tab.

In the current version of the DPW, you can view Jobs and their associated information only for Holdings that have been proposed or ingested into the DPW. In later versions, you will be able to view existing arrangements of the information for the digital holding and created/edit new arrangements for them within the DPW.

The Prometheus Digital Preservation Workbench is an internal system, only accessible to Library staff. All Library staff can view information in DPW but to add content or update information, you need to be a 'registered user' and associated to a collection business unit. To process material in Prometheus you also require the installation of some additional software. If you do not have this access, or would like to have the software installed you will need to contact Digital Preservation via the Service Desk.

All additional inquires and requests for assistance can also be lodged through the Service Desk

Select Digital Collecting Support as the Service Group!

NLA Serice Desk

Conceptual Framework

At the top of the hierarchy is the Bibliographic record for an item. There may be multiple physical holdings records associated with the collection item including books, journals, digital media carriers, etc. 

The conceptual framework for Prometheus is that the user is creating an archive copy of a the Holding’s digital component.

A Call Number for a Bibliographic record may contain one or more digital media carriers as items within the one Holding record. 

Each of those individual digital carrier items become a 'Part' within the Prometheus Job. Such as floppy disks, PDFs, DVDs, etc.

Prometheus stores all these archive copies on the NLA's Digital Object Storage System – DOSS  for on-going managed storage.
Conceptual Framework

The physical Holding for a Bibliographic record item may contain one or more digital media carriers as items within the Holding record. Each of those individual digital carrier items will become a 'Part' within the Digital Holding. Each of these digital media carriers can of course contain many digital files.

Digital Preservation Workbench Jobs

Each Job within the DPW system is associated to one Bibliographic collection item record.

Where the record also has holdings of digital material each job is also associated to the appropriate Holdings record. If there are multiple physical holdings for a bibliographic collection item, then a different Job will need to be created to associate each additional Holdings of digital material with the same Bibliographic collection item record.


1 Job (Digital Holding) = 1 Bibliographic record item + 1 Holdings record

1 Job can have many Parts which could include multiple media items contained within 1 Holdings record


For more information on what you can do in this version and what is planned for future versions please see the About page.
 

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