Demonstration of Policy-Guided Data Preservation Using iRODS

Policy-oriented data management is an emerging field that provides automation of large collection management using policies encoded as machine-executable rules. Digital archives provide long term preservation of collections that can span decades across multiple technology refreshes. Policy-based data management is critical for digital archives because of the need to maintain integrity across long spans of time. The management of preservation policies for large collections can be an onerous task. Typical policies may control ingest of records, extraction of required provenance information, replication of records, retention and disposition, and validation of assessment criteria. The iRODS (the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) is an exemplar that provides distributed data management under a policy-oriented framework that can be applied to long-term data archiving. We will present a demonstration of the preservation environment, including the composition of preservation policies and automated enforcement of policies. A user interface framework will be demonstrated that manages ingest of records into a staging area, automates application of preservation policies, and tracks status of the processing steps.