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Preservation environments such as repositories need scalable and context-aware preservation planning and monitoring capabilities to ensure continued accessibility of content over time. This article identifies a number of gaps in the systems and mechanisms currently available and presents a new, innovative architecture for scalable decision-making and control in such environments.

The paper illustrates the state of the art in preservation planning and monitoring, highlights the key challenges faced by repositories to provide scalable decision-making and monitoring facilities, and presents the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide such capabilities.

The presented architecture makes preservation planning and monitoring context-aware through a semantic representation of key organizational factors, and integrates this with a business intelligence system that collects and reasons upon preservation-relevant information.

The architecture has been implemented in the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite. Integration with repositories and external information sources provide powerful preservation capabilities that can be freely integrated with virtually any repository.

The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.

The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results enable proactive, continuous preservation management through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the digital preservation practices in institutional repositories (IRs) in Africa.

Data were collected from the IRs developed in university libraries in Africa, and it was done in two phases. The phases are website investigation to identify the university libraries in Africa that have developed IR and online questionnaire.

Results from the study showed that the majority of IRs in Africa used DSpace software to manage their digital contents, and more than half of the IRs engage in information migration. The study also revealed that the majority of the responding institutions provide long-term digital preservation in their IR. Interestingly, the majority of the IRs has developed digital preservation policy to guide the implementation of digital preservation for IR contents. Finally, the majority of the respondents indicated that they do not have long-term funding and lack the necessary technical staff with required skills to handle and manage the IR.

Because of language barriers, data were collected from only universities in English speaking countries in Africa.

The findings of this study will make librarians in universities in Africa and other developing countries understand the key issues relating to digital preservation and longevity.

The findings of this study will inform information professionals, librarians in developing countries that are planning to create IRs and provide long-term digital preservation of electronic resources in their institution.

The behaviour of audience, consuming video entertainment, has changed intensely over the years. Lately, the consumers have increasingly preferred to watch video programs, through video-on-demand services through over-the-top medium. The service is novel and the consumer’s perception of the service quality is not well explored. As extant literature considers service quality as the construct to determine the sustained growth of a service, the present study has attempted to explore the dimensions to measure service quality of video-on-demand services.

The authors conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions amongst the user of the video-on-demand service. The qualitative data was content analysed to furnish thematic dimensions.

The study reveals thematic attributes perceived as dimensions to measure service quality of video-on-demand services.

Considering the exploratory nature of the study, the themes proposed might seem nascent. Hence, it was the authors’ discretion to stop expanding the respondent sample to avoid data saturation. A quantitative establishment of the service quality dimensions was beyond the scope of the current research and would follow in a different study.

The objective of the study is to qualitatively explore service quality dimensions of video-on-demand services. In pursuit of that, the current study explored the consumers’ excerpts, content analysed the data and furnished several themes perceived as service quality dimensions in this context. Such a detailed approach is uncommon in this context.

This article aims to evaluate a new architecture for scalable decision-making and control in preservation environments for its ability to address five key goals: scalable content profiling; monitoring of compliance, risks and opportunities; efficient creation of trustworthy plans; context awareness; and loosely coupled preservation ecosystems. Scalable decision support and business intelligence capabilities are required to effectively secure content over time.

We conduct a systematic evaluation of the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide effective and scalable decision support capabilities. We discuss the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of advancing the state of art and report on a case study with a national library.

The system provides substantial capabilities for semi-automated, scalable decision-making and control of preservation functions in repositories. Well-defined interfaces allow a flexible integration with diverse institutional environments. The free and open nature of the tool suite further encourages global take-up in the repository communities.

The article discusses a number of bottlenecks and factors limiting the real-world scalability of preservation environments. This includes data-intensive processing of large volumes of information, automated quality assurance for preservation actions, and the element of human decision-making. We outline open issues and future work.

The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.

The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results of the assessment demonstrate how the system advances the control of digital preservation operations from ad hoc decision-making to proactive, continuous preservation management, through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

The purpose of the paper is to establish whether Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Records Continuum Model (RCM) frameworks could be used to mitigate long-term preservation challenges.

Qualitative research was undertaken using two case studies and interviews were conducted with the different categories of the municipal personnel to solicit answers to the research questions. The questions were designed using the lens of the RCM and its four dimensions that cover the creation, capture, organization and pluralization of records and prescribed factors of ECM which include business process management, enterprise architecture, collaboration, system integration, re-purposing of information, change management, knowledge management and the life cycle management of information. Not all the ECM factors are dealt with in this paper: the remainder have been dealt with in the author's earlier works.

Challenges of long-term preservation of information still persist despite the enormous research that has been generated over the years. The municipalities that were subjects of this research are still grappling with issues of lack of long-term information management policies, enterprise architecture, disparate information systems, collaboration and system integration. This is likely to work against the investments that are being ploughed into e-Government developments should the municipalities fail to espouse strong information and records management regimes. Embracing the ECM prescribed factors and the RCM thinking might mitigate these challenges.

The author's licentiate research proved that there was no discourse between records managers/archivists and ECM proponents. Therefore, the originality of this article lies in the application of the two frameworks of ECM and RCM. The findings confirmed that even within the records management framework the municipalities were addressing factors similar to ECM prescribed factors. Embracing both the RCM model and the ECM prescribed factors might mitigate the challenges of long-term preservation and hence the re-use of information and enhancement of the societal memory.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an approach to data value considerations that is related to the generalized notion of authenticity and can be applied to the design of preservation policies. There has been considerable progress in the scalable architectures for policy-driven digital collection preservation as well as in modeling preservation costs. However, modeling the value of both digital artifacts and collections seems a more elusive topic that has yet to find a proper methodology and means of expression.

A top-down conceptual analysis was developed and the principles of information technology service management and quality management were applied to the domain of digital preservation. Then, in a bottom-up analysis, the various notions of authenticity in digital preservation projects, reference models and conceptual papers were reviewed.

The top-down and bottom-up analyses have a meeting point, establishing a close relation between the concepts of data authenticity and data value.

The generalized understanding of authenticity can support the design of sensible preservation policies and their application to the formation and long-term maintenance of digital collections.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of digital archiving and preservation practices and processes successfully implemented at an academic institution.

This case study chronicles the planning and actions taken to identify, select, package, and archive local digital assets for long‐term access and migration. It includes a literature review and offers selected resources as a starting point for other institutions investigating digital preservation tools and practices.

Digital preservation is a broad, evolving, and important facet of digital asset management, yet often overlooked by library administration and understated in library operations. Collaborative approaches should be considered in implementing digital preservation tools and processes with limited resources.

What is successfully in operation at CSUL may be learned by other institutions. An effective preservation plan and established workflows will give an organization the capability to maximize limited funds and staff time.

The majority of the current literature provides theories, technologies, conceptual models, and large‐scale collaborations, with relatively little describing needs, practices, operations, and experiences at a specific academic library. This paper will contribute to the literature by discussing digital preservation from actual experience, based on the work we perform, the needs we face, and the solutions we reach within our current environment.