Digital Preservation Bake-Off 2023
We are happy to announce the Call for the Digital Preservation Bake-Off 2023 is now open! Proposals welcome until August 7, 2023.
About the Bake-Off
The Digital Preservation Bake-Off is a light-hearted competition that will be held during iPRES 2023 in Urbana-Champaign. No actual baking is required! But kitchen wordplay and metaphors are welcome and encouraged 😉
Developers, coders, and solution providers are invited to demonstrate how their products and tools can be used to address common digital preservation challenges, with live feedback from the audience and a panel of judges.
The 2023 Bake-Off Committee encourages Bakers to register and present in-person in order to engage optimally with the audience and judges. However, support for remote participation by Bakers can be arranged! Live demos are encouraged, though Bakers may also present a demonstration recorded expressly for this competition. No slides, and no generic demos, please. We want to see digital preservation in action!
Bakers are invited to express their interest in participation by August 7, 2023.
The Menu
The Digital Preservation Bake-Off will be staged in three “Courses”:
The Menu Cont.
Bakers will be invited to utilize data from a common set called “The Pantry”, and may choose to create a “dish” for one or two courses, or to prepare a full “meal”. Each “dish” should be designed around a real-world theme or situation recognized by the global digital preservation community. Some examples might include: integrating digital preservation into line-of-business systems; managing thorny content types; metadata extraction and handling; meeting user requirements; scaling up; web-archiving; or achieving greater efficiencies without sacrificing quality of outcomes.
Bakers are welcome to demonstrate a single tool, a chain of tools assembled into a workflow, or a complete solution. Likewise, Bakers are welcome to demonstrate systems produced by large teams as well as specific tools and applications from individual hackers and developers.
Each Baker’s dish(es) will be evaluated on their own merits by a panel of judges. Audience feedback will be taken into consideration and a variety of prizes will be awarded!
The iPREs 2023 Pantry: the Data Set
Every dish is prepared using a shared data set called “iPres 2023 Pantry”. The data set will include a number of different content types, ranging from generic and not-so generic PDFs, still images and Office documents, complex objects such as AV, 3D and disk images, and/or web-based objects such as websites and social media.
The Pantry will also include some ‘exotic ingredients’: data with additional challenges, such as unidentifiable objects, corrupt objects, or legacy file formats.
Bakers can pick and choose from the pantry as they like!
The “Pantry” data set will be released by the end of August.
The Detailed menu
Starters: The Pre-Ingest Aperitif
This course is all about assessing and recovering a resource as a first step in the preservation process. Bakers can demo any process relating to pre-ingest, such as preparing a collection for ingest into a digital preservation system, generating metadata or undertaking quality assurance in the construction of an Information Package.
A “dish” consists of one, or a combination of the following tasks:
- Appraisal
- Cyber Security / Virus checking
- Data protection risk assessment
- Data recovery
- De-duplication
- Disk imaging
- File format identification
- File format characterization
- File format validation
- Harvesting content / metadata from the web
- Metadata extraction and/or creation
- Resolve filename encoding issues
- Technical protection measures
- Any other process relating to pre-ingest – there are so many great cuisines and we might have forgotten dishes! If Bakers include other dishes, they should be prepared to explain why the process is an integral part of pre-ingest.
Main Course: The Preservation Plat du Jour
This course is all about what we do with digital objects within an archive; in other words, about core preservation actions at scale. Bakers can demo any process relating to preservation planning/action and data management, such as generating preservation information during ingest, risk management, or migration.
A “dish” consists of one or a combination of the following tasks:
- Audit/Provenance trail information
- Emulation planning and preparation
- Fixity checking
- Ingest
- Metadata enrichment
- Migration
- Multi copy management
- Normalization
- Preservation metadata (e.g., PREMIS)
- Preservation management / planning / watch
- Replication
- Risk management
- Any other process relating to core preservation functions – there are so many great cuisines and we might have forgotten dishes! If Bakers include other dishes, they should be prepared to explain why the process is an integral part of preservation functions within an archive
Dessert: Access is Sweet
This course is all about access to preserved objects under different conditions. Bakers can demo any process related to management of information needed for access or how access is facilitated for different object/content types in light of different legal / organizational requirements.
A “dish” consists of one or a combination of the following tasks:
- Access to sensitive data / Data protection
- Access rights management
- Advanced resource discovery (content based image / video / sound)
- Automation of access
- Computational access
- Audit/Provenance trail provided on access
- Emulation for access
- Migration on the fly
- Proving authenticity on access
- Presentation of complex objects
- Preservation Information provided on access
- Redaction
- Resource discovery (catalogue)
- Universal accessibility to legacy data
- Updating information packages with metadata generated by external users during access (“Crowd Sourcing”)
- Any other process relating to core preservation functions – there are so many great cuisines and we might have forgotten dishes! If Bakers include other dishes, they should be prepared to explain why the process is an integral part of access within an archive
Things to consider during baking / demo
While there will be no points awarded during the Bake-Off, the judges will give feedback on each dish. In particular, they will look at the following, which Bakers might want to take into consideration when preparing their workflows:
- Difficulty of data used from pantry / data set
- Number of tasks completed
- Quality of outputs
- Clever insight
- On the spot problem solving
- Making it look easy
- Making it actually easy
- Time / cost involved
- Quality of logging tasks
- Including one or more “exotic ingredients”
- Reproducibility of the result/solution
Principles Behing Presenting / baking
- Tools and solutions of all sizes are welcome!
- Presentations can be a live demo or a pre-recorded demo created expressly for the 2023 Bake-Off
- No slides, and no generic demos, please!
- 10 minutes per baker, including audience Q&A
- Each baker can participate in 1, 2 or all 3 courses
- It is not necessary to be the developer of a new tool / software! You can also introduce existing tools in new, innovative ways, e.g. through repurposing, automating, orchestrating etc.
- If you have developed / created a tool and people are using it, this session is probably for you 😉
Are you Ready?
If you would like to join the Digital Preservation Bake-Off, please complete the submission form by August 7, 2023.
The “Pantry” data set will be released by the end of August.
An orientation call for all Bakers will be held in the first week of September. A recording will be made available after the session.
For now, get some inspiration from the iPres 2022 Bake-Off!