Presentations
 Background
 Team
Newsletters

Prometheus - About

In Greek mythology, Prometheus (Ancient Greek: "forethought") is a Titan known for his wily intelligence, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals for their use. He was then punished for his crime by Zeus.

Prometheus is pictured to the left in Heinrich Füger's Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind (1817).

Wikipedia

News


Click here to read latest Prometheus news on SourceForge...

The Digital Preservation Workflow Project was set up to develop a suitable workflow system for long-term preservation, storage and access to digital collection items received on physical carriers or as discrete files. This initiative supports the Library's Process perspective, relating specifically to Strategic Objectives for developing and managing the collections, in responding to the challenge of digital resources and storing and preserving the collection.

Presentations

Digital collecting and Prometheus - Update 2012

Session 1:

  • an overview session designed for a general audience including senior managers – this provided a background to the Prometheus project to existing and newer users and set it within the context of Cataloging workflows and Digital Preservation within the Library
  • improvements over the  3 1/2 years since its release were also outlined

Session 2:

  • coverage of a number of examples of workflows for specific content types such as single electronic publications, adding to an existing series, mixed collection items, and problematic media.
  • outline and brief descriptions of various supporting resources available
  • possible avenues for follow-up sessions with various collection areas prior to initiating the third targeted sessions of hands-on with specific collection areas and their content types

Digital collecting and Prometheus - Update 2012PDF download



DigCCurr2009
[dij-seeker 2009]

(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC USA)

http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr2009/

Digital Curation Tools and Demos - April 1st, 2009

Session 3 - Invited Demo: Prometheus: Managing the Ingest of Media Carriers - Nicholas del Pozo, Douglas Elford & David Pearson (presenter). [Page 73 of Proceedings]

Click here to see this demonstration video Run Demonstration video


World Library and Information Congress
74th IFLA General Conference and Council (Quebec City, Quebec Canada)

Preservation and Conservation - August 11th, 2008
Session 1 - Digital objects on physical carriers

Media Matters: developing processes for preserving digital objects on physical carriers at the National Library of Australia. DOUGLAS ELFORD, NICHOLAS DEL POZO, SNEZANA MIHAJLOVIC, DAVID PEARSON, GERARD CLIFTON and COLIN WEBB (National Library of Australia, Canberra, Australia)

Click here to read this paper

Background

The National Library of Australia has a relatively small but important collection of digital materials on physical carriers, including both published materials and unpublished manuscripts in digital form. To date, preservation of the Library's physical format digital collections has been largely hand-crafted, but this approach is insufficient to deal effectively with the volume of material requiring preservation.

The Digital Preservation Workflow Project aims to produce a semi-automated, scalable process for transferring data from physical carriers to preservation digital mass storage, helping to mitigate the major risks associated with the physical carriers: deterioration of the media and obsolescence of the technology required to access them. The workflow system, expected to be available to Library staff from July 2008, also aims to minimise the time required for acquisition staff to process relatively standard physical media, while remaining flexible to accommodate special cases when required. The system incorporates a range of primarily open source tools, to undertake processes including media imaging, file identification and metadata extraction. The tools are deployed as services within a service-oriented architecture, with workflow processes that use these services being coordinated within a customised system architecture utilising Java based web services. This approach provides flexibility to add or substitute tools and services as they become available and to simplify interactions with other Library systems.




A high level view of the general system processes, many of these activities are performed automatically by the system, with few user tasks required.

This Digital Preservation Workflow (DPW) system allows Library staff to associate digital holdings to Catalogue Bibliographic records in a distributed, semi-automated and scalable process which includes transferring data from physical carriers [CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs], via customised mini-jukeboxes attached to their SOE workstations, to the Digital Preservation area of the NLA's digital mass storage system, including the harvesting of technical metadata all of which helps 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.

The Prometheus Team

The Workflows Project, and Prometheus, would not have been possible without the input of many people. The following team statistics and data was extracted from the Prometheus Head Quarters central database. 

Teamgroup  icon
back to top

Newsletters

back to top

Newsletter #16 Prometheus Release Update 1.5.2 - 17/2/2012

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

We would like to inform you of a scheduled update to Prometheus that will take place early on Monday morning [20/2/2012]. This will involve restarting the Prometheus server and the associated web application you access thru your browser on Our Web. It should only take a few minutes when performed very early in the morning and should not affect any existing jobs and be completed at the latest by 9 am. Therefore, we are asking you to hold off on processing material until after 9 AM.

 This is part of our ongoing scheduled maintenance releases, to improve the functionality of Prometheus both in the user interface and the back-end processing and delivery of your collection materials.

 Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask, especially if you currently have some work in progress.

 What is in this release 1.5.2?

Firstly, for those who may have been on summer  leave over the past few months, we would like to remind you of the new feature released last month:

·         a beta version of the Downloading  Tool to enable retrieving collection material from Prometheus [http://mediapedia.nla.gov.au/prometheus/workflow.html#downloading].

·         the Search functionality has also been greatly improved both in terms of speed and quality of information.

 This 1.5.2 release carries those improvements forward with further improvements in the speed of opening individual Jobs by optimising the service calls to the back end Catalogue and Copyright services.

Another improvement is related to the processing of DVD video discs. We found that there was an inconsistency in the system’s internal permissions which impacted in a somewhat random way on our ability to successfully process DVD video discs.

We are currently working and testing further improvements and should you have any suggestions please do not hesitate to put them forward.

Cheers,

The Prometheus Team

 
Further update information can be found at the Prometheus wiki site.

http://ourweb.nla.gov.au/apps/wiki/display/DPWP/Prometheus+Release+Roadmap

or the About page on the Prometheus Help site.

http://mediapedia.nla.gov.au/prometheus/about.html

back to top

Newsletter #15 - 23/01/2012

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

Apologies for the delay in this update, we have just been informed that the scheduled update to Prometheus can go ahead this morning. This will involve restarting the Prometheus server and web application. It should only take a few minutes when performed and should not affect any existing jobs.

 Could I please therefore ask if you could delay any processing til noon today 23/1/2012.

 Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask especially if you currently have some work in progress.

Further update information can be found at the Prometheus wiki site.

http://ourweb.nla.gov.au/apps/wiki/display/DPWP/Prometheus+Release+Roadmap

or the About page on the Prometheus Help site.

http://mediapedia.nla.gov.au/prometheus/about.html

 

What is in this release 1.5.1?

Snezana, our developer has been quietly working through a number of errors we have been having on submitting material over the past year including the Search functionality.

The following items have been updated or enhanced within this release:

 

Searching Prometheus

The following fields displayed within the Prometheus user interface are now 'searchable fields' within this release. The searching has also been improved via optimisation and additional indexing.

Note: User may like to suggest other fields  to be prioritised in future releases, although some fields may have a detrimental impact on search times.

Data Element

Yes/No/-

Implications if Added

BIB ID [Voyager Number]

Yes

 

BIB Holdings Number

Yes

BIB-Catalogue: Title

Yes

 

BIB-Catalogue: Author

Yes

 

BIB-Catalogue: Description

No

BIB-Catalogue:System Details

No

BIB-Catalogue: Notes

No

Prometheus Job: Number

Yes

Prometheus Job: Digital Holding Number

Yes

Prometheus Job: Name

Yes

Prometheus Job: Owner

No

Prometheus Job: Date Added

No

Prometheus Job: Last Updated

No

Prometheus Job: Priority

No

Prometheus Job: Status

No

Prometheus Job: Annotations - various

No

Prometheus Part: Number

Yes

Prometheus Part: Name

Yes

 

Prometheus Part: Status

No

Prometheus Part: Media Type

No

Prometheus Part: Annotations – System Details

No

Prometheus Part: Annotations – File Format

No

Prometheus Part: Annotations – various others

No

Sprightly Copyright Info: Type

No

Sprightly Copyright Info: Published

No

Sprightly Copyright Info: Copyright

No

Sprightly Copyright Info: Policy

No

 cheers,
Douglas & Somaya

back to top

Newsletter #14 - 25/11/2011

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

This is just a brief update to firstly, let you know that our developer Snezana has been quietly working through the errors we have been having on submitting material over the past year and longer. For example, 11 outstanding errors, going back to our initial launch, have been rectified, submitted and the Jobs are now finished.

The three most prominent submission errors too have had 'patches' applied to the ingest service this week. Therefore Jobs with this error type will be 'quietly' transferred
from your Working Folder to the Digital Preservation team for restarting at a very specific point before being tested for completion and final submission. We intend to notify you upon their successful outcome or should additional Part annotations are required. This will move successfully submitted/ ingested jobs that were in error in your Working to your Finished folder, along with assigning you credit for processing that Prometheus Job. Should you note that the Parts are missing Annotations in terms of System Details and File Formats you can still add these annotations to the Part but will not be able to rename the Part or the Job. Should you have any further questions please do not hesitate to ask us.

Further error rectification on other submission or
analysis errors along with tweaks for speeding up the system will continue into the new year. We also welcome any suggestions for tweaks to make the system easier or less confusing for you to use.

Also of note, I will be on leave from Dec.1st to Dec.16th so please during this time, or any time, to direct any queries or problems to Somaya Langley 
- slangley@nla.gov.au 6262-1319.

Thank you for all your support over the past year, Somaya and I wish you all a safe and happy holiday season.

cheers,

Douglas & Somaya


Newsletter #13 - 12/9/2011

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

This is just a brief note to introduce you to our new Digital Preservation team member Somaya Langley - slangley@nla.gov.au 6262-1319

Some of you may remember Somaya from her previous work here at the Library.

One of Somaya’s roles within Digital Preservation will be assisting me with managing the Prometheus application and any user problems.

 

Also, returning to the Library is our Prometheus developer Snezana Mihajlovic.

Snezana has been initially assisting with the rectification of a permissions and access issue with the new HP desktops optical drive by Prometheus.

She has now turned her attention to the large number of Jobs stuck in Ingest along with a number of other documented errors such as Analysing.


Should you have any niggling issues that you have noticed about Prometheus that you feel we can rectify, please pass them along to Somaya or myself so that we can research and lodge an issue for rectification.

 
cheers,

Douglas

 

Newsletter #12 - 3/6/2011

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

 This is just a short note to update you about using Prometheus with the new NLA workstations.

 So what is new?

 The new HP 8100 workstations have much more power and RAM, hence this should make the initial stage of copying the physical media carrier much quicker for you. These workstations are currently being rolled out in stages to various sections.

 You will be notified of a timeframe for switching over your workstation to the new one.

Once you have received your new workstation, could you please contact me to organise the finalisation and setup of the Prometheus software application on your new workstation.

 Should you have any questions on how this may affect your current work, changes/updates to your section’s on-line workflow procedures or any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask, either via the ServiceDesk or directly to me at delford@nla.gov.au. We appreciate your feedback.

cheers,

Douglas




Newsletter #11 - 17/12/2010

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

This is just a short note to wish you all a Joyous Noel along with a safe and happy holiday season.

I will also be on leave from Dec 24th to January 17th. Should you have any urgent issues my colleague Nick del Pozo will be back from Dec 30th and may be able to assist, although our IT Digital Library support person will be away til Jan 10th.

Although possibly appearing a bit slow to access, Prometheus has been running much faster and more successfully on the back end side, due to a change to a less overloaded database server, at the end of October. This has dramatically reduced the number of Analysing errors and enabled more successful restarts, if required too.

Interestingly over 78 jobs were completed in November, almost more than double any previous month. There are still a few glitches from time to time of course, but generally over 95% of jobs are now finishing without a glitch. Hopefully this will also carry over through the holiday season and into the new year. :-)

Some of the glitches can still be caused by discs not correctly written to documented standards of formatting , occasional unusual font utilisation or memory errors during processing. For example deletion of a Part on some CD formats can still cause an ingest error too. I would appreciate your assistance in documenting the cause of these errors so that they can be logged and hopefully scheduled for rectification by IT. 

I have tested Prometheus on the forthcoming Windows 7 operating system, included in the Library's new Standard Operating Envirnoment (SOE) with good success. The newer hardware is yet to be tested, but should enable easier copying of some physical media, especially large USB flash or hard drives.

Best Wishes!

Douglas

back to top
Newsletter #10 - 15/4/2010

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

This is just a short note to mention that I have been informed of an upgrade to Prometheus, as of today, Thursday April 15th, on the Prometheus server applications..

So what is new?
Even though the version number on the opening page is still listed as v1.3.0, there have been behind the scenes changes.

These changes include:

•    a major upgrade to the Unpack Service, which has caused some errors on specific format media carriers;

•    implementation of recognition and processing of VCD video discs;

•    building reporting capabilities;

•    rectification of error messages in Transfers;

•    improvement in the capture of a single file;

•    rectification of Ingest Service errors, on specific format media carriers;

•    system stability and code refactoring.

These changes will be seamless to the user.

Those who have yet to take up the offer for the installation of the new desktop software client, as outlined in the last newsletter of 9/3/2010, will need that update installed before proceeding with any Prometheus work.

Should you have any questions on how this may affect your current work or any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask, either via the ServiceDesk or directly to me at delford@nla.gov.au. We appreciate your feedback.

cheers,
Douglas

back to top
Newsletter #9 - 9/3/2010 - Prometheus 1.2 now available

Hello Prometheus Users and Associates,

This is just a short note to mention that we are about to perform an upgrade to Prometheus on Thursday March 11th, on both your desktop application and the network Prometheus server application..

As a consequence of this Prometheus will be off line for all of that day, returning on-line again on Friday the 12th of March.

Please do not attempt to process material on the 12th.

Action: During this down period I will need to update the application on your user desktop computer which you use to run Prometheus on, so if you could please e-mail me to arrange with me a time for this update to take place at your convenience -  delford@nla.gov.au .

So what is new?
Well other than a new version number on the opening page of v1.3, most of the changes will be behind the scenes.

These changes include:

•    capturing and reporting meaningful error message and the ability to restart and recover from system errors,

•    system stability,

•     indexing,

•    optimisation which should speed up some of the processes.

For more specific details please see the Upgrade Details section at the bottom of this e-mail.

Also in terms of assistance and on-line Help, there are two new announcements to make too.

•    Firstly, the NLA Service Desk on OurWeb has been update to enable users to place requests for Setting up a New User, Training bookings, Updating Help Documentation or for general enquires about digital preservation issues.

•    It also allows users to report incidents with processing media, Prometheus errors message actions or Prometheus jukeboxes.

•    Please follow the link: http://servicedesk.nla.gov.au/ and select Digital Preservation in the Service Group listing. A detailed FAQ for using this new service for Digital Preservation requests or incidents can be found at: http://servicedesk.nla.gov.au/otrs/customer.pl?Action=CustomerFAQ&Subaction=Explorer&CategoryID=3

•    Secondly, the Prometheus on-line Help has been updated to assist in clarification of any of the newly introduced Error Messages and what appropriate action to take upon their occurrence. http://mediapedia.nla.gov.au/prometheus/index.html

Should you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask, either via the ServiceDesk or directly to me at delford@nla.gov.au.

cheers,
Douglas
x1366/x1365

back to top
Update - 5/6/2009

Howdy All,

An updated version of the Prometheus has been placed on-line and linked to the Help link within the Prometheus user interface. This greatly expanded resource will be easier to update and custonise to various collection area needs hence it will replace the current 'hardcopy' Users Guide.

http://mediapedia.nla.gov.au/prometheus/index.html

cheers,

Douglas

back to top
Newsletter #8 - 5/12/2008 

Howdy All,
Just a short note to mention that I, and most of the team, will be on leave from the 15th of December [back Jan. 5th].

In order to assist with your Prometheus use though, I have completely re-written the online help guide and turned it into a handy hardcopy booklet.

I have printed and bound 20 copies. It should also be noted that the existing online help is presently 'out of date' and not easy to access for any further updating.

I have also attached a DRAFT copy of 'Prometheus - Digital Preservation Workbench Users’ Guide – Sectional Notes'. It is intended to enable the development of specific Sectional Notes for utilising Prometheus for each collection area - akin to those found in Div1 Procedures section on ourWeb, where they and the Users' Guide are anticipated on finally living.

Should you wish to obtain a copy of the 'Prometheus - Digital Preservation Workbench Users’ Guide' booklet, assist in developing Sectional Notes for your area, have any outstanding questions, or require further assistance please do not hesitate to ask.

On behalf of the Digital Preservation Team, we wish you all a Happy (and Safe) Festive Season!

cheers,
Douglas

back to top
Update - 28/10/2008 - UPDATE: Prometheus 1.2 now available

Release 1.2 of the 'Prometheus' Digital Preservation Workbench is now live and available for use.

The application is available at the following location: http://ourweb.nla.gov.au/apps/digipres-web/

Please advise of any issues you encounter or contact Douglas Elford (x1366) or Gerard Clifton (x1381) for assistance.

Help documentation for the application is available at: http://ourweb.nla.gov.au/apps/digipres-web/help/help.html (and via the Help link in the application.)


Release Notes - Digital Preservation Workflow - Version 1.2

This is an update to the 'Prometheus' Digital Preservation Workbench.

Recent enhancements
This release includes:

•    Integration of the Ingest Service. Users can now use the "Mark Job as Complete" button to complete the transfer of material to preservation storage.

Successfully ingested Jobs will attain a "Finished" status.

•    Improved media recognition for CD / DVD

•    Minor adjustments to the user interface.

•    Amendments to technical metadata collection during analysis and recording of Ingest events.

                                   
Known Issues

•    Firefox 2 is recommended - there are some small issues with IE7, and the recently released Firefox 3 is not currently supported.

•    Asian characters and VCDs are not currently supported

•    Annotations can be added and edited for submitted and finished jobs, but finished jobs cannot yet be transferred. (This will require some change to the flow of statuses, and will be addressed in a later release). Currently, only the job owner who submitted the job for upload can edit annotations for these jobs.

back to top back to top of page