The Third Digital Preservation Challenge
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About
We are looking for ideas from creative students from all backgrounds with an interest in computer science. The challenge is to develop digital preservation solutions that overcome the barriers hindering access to three digital objects, each accompanied by a scenario based on real-life situations: Electronic art, Webarchiving and Unknown files.
Scenarios for the Third Digital Preservation Challenge
*Awards*
First Prize: 3000 Euros
Second Prize: 1500 Euros
Third Prize: 500 Euros
Important dates
Opening of the Challenge: 5 January 2009
Deadline for submissions: 15 June 2009 at 4pm GMT
Announcement of winners: iPres 5-6 October 2009, San Francisco, United States
Rules and Regulations
The third challenge asks participants to provide thought-out solution for one of the three tasks. DPE will award prices for each of the tasks. It is up to the participants to provide solutions for more than one task; multiple submissions will be evaluated separately. DPE keep the option open to award prices for all tasks depending on the quality of the submissions. The prices will be announced soon.
You will be required to read and agree to the rules and regulations before making your submission to this Preservation Challenge. To be eligible to enter, you must register to become a member of the DPE user community. There is no fee involved in joining the DPE user community.
Rules and Regulations of the Third DPE challenge
Become a Member of the DPE community
Evaluating submissions
Submissions to the third Digital Preservation Challenge will be assessed by a panel of international digital preservation experts and practitioners. The incremental scoring method the panel will use emphasises the thoroughness and quality of the documentation of the processes used to solve a challenge task rather than the overall outcome itself. In this respect, solutions to single tasks or sections of the challenge will also be considered and it may be possible for an individual to win the challenge even if he/she cannot ultimately render all the objects. Winning submissions to the Digital Preservation Challenge will be published on the DPE website following the announcement of the winning entries.
Questions or comments should be sent to
Scenarios for Third DPE Challenge
Electronic Art
Scenario 1
Founded in 1987, the Prix Ars Electronica is an interdisciplinary platform for digital art and media culture. The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important awards for creativity and pioneering spirit in the field of digital media. With the rapid change of software tools and frameworks for multimedia authoring their artworks are in danger of becoming inaccessible and unusable. These are highly heterogeneous in terms of technology, usually requiring user interaction. Your assignment is to devise a solution for preserving these historic digital artworks for future generations and, if possible, implement it. This may range from filming groups of people interacting with these pieces of art via automated programs emulating user input (screen capture) to emulator frameworks and self-describing objects, to name just a few.
Task
Your task is to:
- describe the strategy you have chosen, clearly explain why you chose this particular strategy and which properties of the objects are preserved or lost through its application
- provide a prototype solution of your strategy using the artworks provided; submit source code as well as an executable file with instructions necessary to run it
- provide an estimate of costs and effort of applying your chosen strategy
Evaluation
Evaluation will be based on the progress participants make in completing the tasks outlined above and also on the thorough description of the steps taken to complete each task. The submission will be evaluated according to the following points in particular:
1. Level of detail in describing the strategy and quality of the argumentation.
2. Quality and suitability of the developed preservation strategy.
3. Quality, feasibility and ease of use of the prototype as well as stability of the submitted code.
Web Archiving
Scenario 2
Your company wants to preserve their website and other websites of potential interest to document their growth and evolution in business over time. You are asked to develop a preservation strategy for harvested websites in ARC. The strategy potentially consists of different preservation action services. The developed strategy will be applied to two internet domains to analyse its advantages and disadvantages.
Task
Your tasks are:
Devise a preservation strategy for websites.
- Harvest the two following internet domains documenting date and time of harvest:
digitalpreservationeurope.eu with a depth of 2 levels (approximately 15-70 MB of data) or www-rai.it with a depth of 2 levels (approximately 40MB of data) - Apply the preservation strategy to the harvested websites (in (W)ARC format), document and analyse the quality of the result. Give an estimate of the resources required (such as time, storage, effort, costs) to deploy the strategies on large scale repository.
Evaluation
Evaluation will be based on the progress participants make in completing the tasks outlined above and also on the thorough description of the steps taken to complete each task. The submission will be evaluated according to the following points in particular:
1. Quality, level of detail and suitability of the description of the proposed preservation strategy.
2. Suitability of the preservation strategy covering special document types (Such as html pages, images, PDF documents, powerpoint files, videos). Note that the focus in this case probably will not lie on the perfect preservation of each type of object, but on a reasonable trade-off that should be argued for.
3. Quality of the preservation of the interlinking between the objects.
4. Quality and level of detail in the analysis of the results.
Unknown files
Scenario 3
In the aftermath of the world financial crisis you purchase a company at a rock bottom price. Following the purchase you carry out a data audit to identify the company’s digital assets and amongst the various holdings, you find a set of older files in a directory which includes a very short but intriguing description which leads you to believe that these files may serve as the basis of a very promising commercial venture. With your curiosity piqued you embark on a quest to discover what kind of documents they are, and what information they contain.
Task
Your task is to:
- identify what kind of files they are
- find out what information they contain
- show a way how the information in the files can be converted to a form that is readily usable on modern computer systems (preferably in an automated manner)
Evaluation
Evaluation will be based on the progress participants make in completing the tasks outlined above and also on the thorough description of the steps taken to complete each task. The submission will be evaluated according to the following points in particular:
1. Quality and level of detail of the description of the file format and the steps taken to identify it 2. Quality and level of detail of the description of the contained information.
3. Quality, level of detail and suitability of the description of the proposed preservation strategy.
4. Quality, feasibility, automation and ease of use of the prototype as well as stability of the submitted code.
