Hi Sarah, Evelyn, Ross and others,
Thanks for yesterday’s very informative session on the progress of the
METS/PREMIS verbosity reduction work (and thanks Welcome Collection and
Bodleian for sponsoring it). Processing all that was said yesterday I have a
few questions left I would like to share with you.
If I understood correctly (and it was quite ‘heady’ yesterday so excuse me if
I’m wrong) there will be three METS files instead of one. One ‘main file’, one
file containing the PREMIS events and one file containing the tool output. If
correct, could it be that in the case of an AIP with a huge amount of (small)
files (we have 100.000+ archives) the two latter files can still be huge and so
unruly? Probably testing is needed to prove how that will pan out? And looking
at our own use case: would this mean we can ingest our larger archives? Or are
more things needed?
Which brings me to the linked data solution: as I understood yesterday this is
still seen as the most ideal solution to this problem but implementing this
means a total restructuring of Archivematica and is therefore a project of
totally other order. Two questions here: How big would such a project (roughly)
be? And related: how much better would Archivematica operate if this investment
was made? I realize these are really hard questions to answer but what I really
want to say is this: if a big investment would Archivematica make a
significantly better product maybe we could a find a larger group of sponsors
who be willing to invest and bring Archivematica to another level.
Coming back to my earlier email about the role of the PSP group I think that in
attributing to answering questions like these the PSP group can make a
difference.
All the best and have a nice weekend,
Robert
