Moving a proof of concept into production? it's harder than you might think...

Myself and colleagues blogged a lot during the Filling the Digital Preservation Gap Project but I’m aware that I’ve gone a bit quiet on this topic since…

I was going to wait until we had a big success to announce, but follow on work has taken longer than expected. So in the meantime here is an update on where we are and what we are up to.

Background

Just to re-cap, by the end of phase 3 of Filling the Digital Preservation Gap we had created a working proof of concept at the University of York that demonstrated that it is possible create an automated preservation workflow for research data using PURE, Archivematica, Fedora and Samvera (then called Hydra!).

This is described in our phase 3 project report (and a detailed description of the workflow we were trying to implement was included as an appendix in the phase 2 report).

After the project was over, it was agreed that we should go ahead and move this into production.

Progress has been slower than expected. I hadn’t quite appreciated just how different a proof of concept is to a production-ready environment!

Here are some of the obstacles we have encountered (and in some cases overcome):

Error reporting

One of the key things that we have had to build in to the existing code in order to get it ready for production is error handling.

This was not a priority for the proof of concept. A proof of concept is really designed to demonstrate that something is possible, not to be used in earnest.

If errors happen and things stop working (which they sometimes do) you can just kill it and rebuild.

In a production environment we want to be alerted when something goes wrong so we can work out how to fix it. Alerts and errors are crucial to a system like this.

We are sorting this out by enabling Archivematica's own error handling and error catching within Automation Tools.

What happens when something goes wrong?

...and of course once things have gone wrong in Archivematica and you've fixed the underlying technical issue, you then need to deal with any remaining problems with your information packages in Archivematica.

For example, if the problems have resulted in failed transfers in Archivematica then you need to work out what you are going to do with those failed transfers. Although it is (very) tempting to just clear out Archivematica and start again, colleagues have advised me that it is far more useful to actually try and solve the problems and establish how we might handle a multitude of problematic scenarios if we were in a production environment!

So we now have scenarios in which an automated transfer has failed so in order to get things moving again we need to carry out a manual transfer of the dataset into Archivematica. Will the other parts of our workflow still work if we intervene in this way?

One issue we have encountered along the way is that though our automated transfer uses a specific 'datasets' processing configuration that we have set up within Archivematica, when we push things through manually it uses the 'default' processing configuration which is not what we want.

We are now looking at how we can encourage Archivematica to use the specified processing configuration. As described in the Archivematica documentation, you can do this by including an XML file describing your processing configuration within your transfer.

It is useful to learn lessons like this outside of a production environment!

File size/upload

Although our project recognised that there would be limit to the size of dataset that we could accept and process with our application, we didn't really bottom out what size dataset we intended to support.

It has now been agreed that we should reasonably expect the data deposit form to accept datasets of up to 20 GB in size. Anything larger than this would need to be handed in a different way.

Testing the proof of concept in earnest showed that it was not able to handle datasets of over 1 GB in size. Its primary purpose was to demonstrate the necessary integrations and workflow not to handle larger files.

Additional (and ongoing) work was required to enable the web deposit form to work with larger datasets.

Space

In testing the application we of course ended up trying to push some quite substantial datasets through it.

This was fine until everything abrubtly seemed to stop working!

The problem was actually a fairly simple one but because of our own inexperience with Archivematica it took a while to troubleshoot and get things moving in the right direction again.

It turned out that we hadn’t allocated enough space in one of the bits of filestore that Archivematica uses for failed transfers (/var/archivematica/sharedDirectory/failed). This had filled up and was stopping Archivematica from doing anything else.

Once we knew the cause of the problem the available space was increased but then everything ground to a halt again because we had quickly used that up again ….increasing the space had got things moving but of course while we were trying to demonstrate the fact that it wasn't working, we had deposited several further datasets which were waiting in the transfer directory and quickly blocked things up again.

On a related issue, one of the test datasets I had been using to see how well Research Data York could handle larger datasets consisted of c.5 GB consisting of about 2000 JPEG images. Of course one of the default normalisation tasks in Archivematica is to convert all of these JPEGs to TIFF.

Once this collection of JPEGs were converted to TIFF the size of the dataset increased to around 80 GB. Until I witnessed this it hadn't really occurred to me that this could cause problems.

The solution - allocate Archivematica much more space than you think it will need!

We also now have the filestore set up so that it will inform us when the space in these directories gets to 75% full. Hopefully this will allow us to stop the filestore filling up in the future.

Workflow

The proof of concept did not undergo rigorous testing - it was designed for demonstration purposes only.

During the project we thought long and hard about the deposit, request and preservation workflows that we wanted to support, but we were always aware that once we had it in an environment that we could all play with and test, additional requirements would emerge.

As it happens, we have discovered that the workflow implemented is very true to that described in the appendix of our phase 2 report and does meet our needs. However, there are lots of bits of fine tuning required to enhance the functionality and make the interface more user friendly.

The challenge here is to try to carry out the minimum of work required to turn it into an adequate solution to take into production. There are so many enhancements we could make – I have a wish list as long as my arm – but until we better understand whether a local solution or a shared solution (provided by the Jisc Research Data Shared Service) will be adopted in the future it is not worth trying to make this application perfect.

Making it fit for production is the priority. Bells and whistles can be added later as necessary!





My thanks to all those who have worked on creating, developing, troubleshooting and testing this application and workflow. It couldn't have happened without you!

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

Preserving Google docs - decisions and a way forward

Back in April I blogged about some work I had been doing around finding a suitable export (and ultimately preservation) format for Google documents.

This post has generated a lot of interest and I've had some great comments both on the post itself and via Twitter.

I was also able to take advantage of a slot I had been given at last week's Jisc Research Data Network event to introduce the issue to the audience (who had really come to hear me talk about something else but I don't think they minded).

There were lots of questions and discussion at the end of this session, mostly focused on the Google Drive issue rather than the rest of the talk. I was really pleased to see that the topic had made people think. In a lightening talk later that day, William Kilbride, Executive Director of The Digital Preservation Coalition mused on the subject of "What is data?". Google Drive was one of the examples he used, asking where does the data end and the software application start?

I just wanted to write a quick update on a couple of things - decisions that have been made as a result of this work and attempts to move the issue forward.

Decisions decisions

I took a summary of the Google docs data export work to my colleagues in a Research Data Management meeting last month in order to discuss a practical way forward for the institutional research data we are planning on capturing and preserving.

One element of the Proof of Concept that we had established at the end of phase 3 of Filling the Digital Preservation Gap was a deposit form to allow researchers to deposit data to the Research Data York service.

As well as the ability to enable researchers to browse and select a file or a folder on their computer or network, this deposit form also included a button to allow deposit to be carried out via Google Drive.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Google Drive is widely used at our institution. It is clear that many researchers are using Google Drive to collect, create and analyse their research data so it made sense to provide an easy way for them to deposit direct from Google Drive. I just needed to check out the export options and decide which one we should support as part of this automated export.

However, given the inconclusive findings of my research into export options it didn't seem that there was one clear option that adequately preserved the data.

As a group we decided the best way out of this imperfect situation was to ask researchers to export their own data from Google Drive in whatever format they consider best captures the significant properties of the item. By exporting themselves in a manual fashion prior to upload, this does give them the opportunity to review and check their files and make their own decision on issues such as whether comments are included in the version of their data that they upload to Research Data York.

So for the time being we are disabling the Google Drive upload button from our data deposit interface....which is a shame because a certain amount of effort went into getting that working in the first place.

This is the right decision for the time being though. Two things need to happen before we can make this available again:

1. Understanding the use case - We need to gain a greater understanding of how researchers use Google Drive and what they consider to be 'significant' about their native Google Drive files.
2. Improving the technology - We need to make some requests to Google to make the export options better.

Understanding the use case

We've known for a while that some researchers use Google Drive to store their research data. The graphic below was taken from a survey we carried out with researchers in 2013 to find out about current practice across the institution. 

Of the 188 researchers who answered the question "Where is your digital research data stored (excluding back up copies)?" 22 mentioned Google Drive. This is only around 12% of respondents but I would speculate that over the last four years, use of Google Drive will have increased considerably as Google applications have become more embedded within the working practices of staff and students at the University.

Where is your digital research data stored (excluding back up copies)?

To understand the Google Drive use case today I really need to talk to researchers.

We've run a couple of Research Data Management teaching sessions over the last term. These sessions are typically attended by PhD students but occasionally a member of research staff also comes along. When we talk about data storage I've been asking the researchers to give a show of hands as to who is using Google Drive to store at least some of their research data.

About half of the researchers in the room raise their hand.

So this is a real issue. 

Of course what I'd like to do is find out exactly how they are using it. Whether they are creating native Google Drive files or just using Google Drive as a storage location or filing system for data that they create in another application.

I did manage to get a bit more detail from one researcher who said that they used Google Drive as a way of collaborating on their research with colleagues working at another institution but that once a document has been completed they will export the data out of Google Drive for storage elsewhere. 

This fits well with the solution described above.

I also arranged a meeting with a Researcher in our BioArCh department. Professor Matthew Collins is known to be an enthusiastic user of Google Drive.

Talking to Matthew gave me a really interesting perspective on Google Drive. For him it has become an essential research tool. He and his colleagues use many of the features of the Google Suite of tools for their day to day work and as a means to collaborate and share ideas and resources, both internally and with researchers in other institutions. He showed me PaperPile, an extension to Google Drive that I had not been aware of. He uses this to manage his references and share them with colleagues. This clearly adds huge value to the Google Drive suite for researchers.

He talked me through a few scenarios of how they use Google - some, (such as the comments facility) I was very much aware of. Others, I've not used myself such as the use of the Google APIs to visualise for example activity on preparing a report in Google Drive - showing a time line and when different individuals edited the document. Now that looks like fun!

He also talked about the importance of the 'previous versions' information that is stored within a native Google Drive file. When working collaboratively it can be useful to be able to track back and see who edited what and when. 

He described a real scenario in which he had had to go back to a previous version of a Google Sheet to show exactly when a particular piece of data had been entered. I hadn't considered that the previous versions feature could be used to demonstrate that you made a particular discovery first. Potentially quite important in the competitive world of academic research.

For this reason Matthew considered the native Google Drive file itself to be "the ultimate archive" and "a virtual collaborative lab notebook". A flat, static export of the data would not be an adequate replacement.

He did however acknowledge that the data can only exist for as long as Google provides us with the facility and that there are situations where it is a good idea to take a static back up copy.

He mentioned that the precursor to Google Docs was a product called Writely (which he was also an early adopter of). Google bought Writely in 2006 after seeing the huge potential in this online word processing tool. Matthew commented that backwards compatibility became a problem when Google started making some fundamental changes to the way the application worked. This is perhaps the issue that is being described in this blog post: Google Docs and Backwards Compatibility.

So, I'm still convinced that even if we can't preserve a native Google Drive file perfectly in a static form, this shouldn't stop us having a go!

Improving the technology

Along side trying to understand how researchers use Google Drive and what they consider to be significant and worthy of preservation, I have also been making some requests and suggestions to Google around their export options. There are a few ideas I've noted that would make it easier for us to archive the data.

I contacted the Google Drive forum and was told that as a Google customer I was able to log in and add my suggestions to Google Cloud Connect so this I did...and what I asked for was as follows:

• Please can we have a PDF/A export option?
• Please could we choose whether or not to export comments or not ...and if we are exporting comments can we choose whether historic/resolved comments are also exported
• Please can metadata be retained - specifically the created and last modified dates. (Author is a bit trickier - in Google Drive a document has an owner rather than an author. The owner probably is the author (or one of them) but not necessarily if ownership has been transferred).
• I also mentioned a little bug relating to comment dates that I found when exporting a Google document containing comments out into docx format and then importing it back again.

Since I submitted these feature requests and comments in early May it has all gone very very quiet...

I have a feeling that ideas only get anywhere if they are popular ...and none of my ideas are popular ...because they do not lead to new and shiny functionality.

Only one of my suggestions (re comments) has received a vote by another member of the community.

So, what to do?

Luckily, since having spoken about my problem at the Jisc Research Data Network, two people have mentioned they have Google contacts who might be interested in hearing my ideas.

I'd like to follow up on this, but in the meantime it would be great if people could feedback to me. 

• Are my suggestions sensible? 
• Are there are any other features that would help the digital preservation community preserve Google Drive? I can't imagine I've captured everything...

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

A typical week as a digital archivist?

Sometimes (admittedly not very often) I'm asked what I actually do all day. So at the end of a busy week being a digital archivist I've decided to blog about what I've been up to.

Monday

Today I had a couple of meetings. One specifically to talk about digital preservation of electronic theses submissions. I've also had a work experience placement in this week so have set up a metadata creation task which he has been busy working on.

When I had a spare moment I did a little more testing work on the EAD harvesting feature the University of York is jointly sponsoring Artefactual Systems to develop in AtoM. Testing this feature from my perspective involves logging into the test site that Artefactual has created for us and tweaking some of the archival descriptions. Once those descriptions are saved, I can take a peek at the job scheduler and make sure that new EAD files are being created behind the scenes for the Archives Hub to attempt to harvest at a later date.

This piece of development work has been going on for a few months now and communications have been technically quite complex so I'm also trying to ensure all the organisations involved are happy with what has been achieved and will be arranging a virtual meeting so we can all get together and talk through any remaining issues.

I was slightly surprised today to have a couple of requests to talk to the media. This has sprung from the news that the Queen's Speech will be delayed. One of the reasons for the delay relates to the fact that the speech has to be written on goat's skin parchment, which takes a few days to dry. I had previously been interviewed for a article entitled Why is the UK still printing its laws on vellum? and am now mistaken for someone who knows about vellum. I explained to potential interviewers that this is not my specialist subject!

Tuesday

In the morning I went to visit a researcher at the University of York. I wanted to talk to him about how he uses Google Drive in relation to his research. This is a really interesting topic to me right now as I consider how best we might be able to preserve current research datasets. Seeing how exactly Google Drive is used and what features the researcher considers to be significant (and necessary for reuse) is really helpful when thinking about a suitable approach to this problem. I sometimes think I work a little bit too much in my own echo chamber, so getting out and hearing different perspectives is incredibly valuable.

Later that afternoon I had an unexpected meeting with one of our depositors (well, there were two of them actually). I've not met them before but have been working with their data for a little while. In our brief meeting it was really interesting to chat and see the data from a fresh perspective. I was able to reunite them with some digital files that they had created in the mid 1980's, had saved on to floppy disk and had not been able to access for a long time.

Digital preservation can be quite a behind the scenes sort of job - we always give a nod to the reason why we do what we do (ie: we preserve for future reuse), but actually seeing the results of that work unfold in front of your eyes is genuinely rewarding. I had rescued something from the jaws of digital obsolescence so it could now be reused and revitalised!

At the end of the day I presented a joint webinar for the Open Preservation Foundation called 'PRONOM in practice'. Alongside David Clipsham (The National Archives) and Justin Simpson (Artefactual Systems), I talked about my own experiences with PRONOM, particularly relating to file signature creation, and ending with a call to arms "Do try this at home!". It would be great if more of the community could get involved!

I was really pleased that the webinar platform worked OK for me this time round (always a bit stressful when it doesn't) and that I got to use the yellow highlighter pen on my slides.

In my spare moments (which were few and far between), I put together a powerpoint presentation for the following day...

Wednesday

I spent the day at the British Library in Boston Spa. I'd been invited to speak at a training event they regularly hold for members of staff who want to find out a bit more about digital preservation and the work of the team.

I was asked specifically to talk through some of the challenges and issues that I face in my work. I found this pretty easy - there are lots of challenges - and I eventually realised I had too many slides so had to cut it short! I suppose that is better than not having enough to say!

Visiting Boston Spa meant that I could also chat to the team over lunch and visit their lab. They had a very impressive range of old computers and were able to give me a demonstration of Kryoflux (which I've never seen in action before) and talk a little about emulation. This was a good warm up for the DPC event about emulation I'm attending next week: Halcyon On and On: Emulating to Preserve.

Still left on my to do list from my trip is to download Teracopy. I currently use Foldermatch for checking that files I have copied have remained unchanged. From the quick demo I saw at the British Library I think that Teracopy would be a more simple one step solution. I need to have a play with this and then think about incorporating it into the digital ingest workflow.

Sharing information and collaborating with others working in the digital preservation field really is directly beneficial to the day to day work that we do!

Thursday

Back in the office today and a much quieter day.

I extracted some reports from our AtoM catalogue for a colleague and did a bit of work with our test version of Research Data York. I also met with another colleague to talk about storing and providing access to digitised images.

In the afternoon I wrote another powerpoint presentation, this time for a forthcoming DPC event: From Planning to Deployment: Digital Preservation and Organizational Change.

I'm going to be talking about our experiences of moving our Research Data York application from proof of concept to production. We are not yet in production and some of the reasons why will be explored in the presentation! Again I was asked to talk about barriers and challenges and again, this brief is fairly easy to fit! The event itself is over a week away so this is unprecedentedly well organised. Long may it continue!

Friday

On Fridays I try to catch up on the week just gone and plan for the week ahead as well as reading the relevant blogs that have appeared over the week. It is also a good chance to catch up with some admin tasks and emails.

Lunch time reading today was provided by William Kilbride's latest blog post. Some of it went over my head but the final messages around value and reuse and the need to "do more with less" rang very true.

Sometimes I even blog myself - as I am today!




Was this a typical week - perhaps not, but in this job there is probably no such thing! Every week brings new ideas, challenges and surprises!

I would say the only real constant is that I've always got lots of things to keep me busy.

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist