This Microsoft sponsored workshop will provide an overview of workflow systems and a set of generic workflow components for ingest, preservation, curation and ongoing access to materials that can be re-used by the workshop participants in their own repositories.

Stacy Kowalczyk, Kavitha Chandrasekar and Yiming Sun will host this Microsoft sponsored workshop

Workflow systems can help librarians, technologists, and repository managers streamline processing by integrating existing, well known software (such as JHOVE ) with repository specific needs. At ingest, workflow systems can orchestrate processes to verify and validate formats, create derivative files, and create structural and administrative metadata. Workflows can automate a wide variety of preservation actions such as format normalization, metadata extraction from data files, and provenance and preservation metadata generation. Curation processes such as fixity verification, format migration, and preservation metadata updates can be automated with workflows as well. In addition to the administrative functions of ingest, preservation, and curation, workflows can provide additional functionality for dissemination processes such as converting file formats on demand for rendering, providing “snippets” of data files for discovery, and packaging numerous large files into a single compressed file, such as zip or tar, for faster and more efficient delivery.

This 3-hour workshop will provide an overview of workflow systems, a set of generic workflow components specifically developed for ingest, preservation, curation and ongoing access to materials that can be re-used by the workshop participants in their own repositories, hands-on experience using the Trident Workflow Workbench to compose workflows using the preservation and curation components provided, and a roadmap to creating customized components.

Each participant will be expected to bring a laptop or other fully capable computing platform with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection software loaded and enabled - you can download this here [PC] or here [Mac].

Organised and led by staff from the Indiana University Data to Insight Center:

Beth Plale, Ph.D. is a full Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. She has broad research and governance interest in long term preservation and access to scientific data, and enabling computational access to large-scale data for broader groups of researchers.

Stacy Kowalczyk, Ph.D. has spent most of her professional life working in library automation. She managed software development at library information system vendors, the Harvard University Library, and Indiana University Libraries Digital Library Program. She is a researcher in the Data to Insight Center of the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University.

For more information visit: Workshop Webpage
or The 7th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2012) Website