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A rapidly increasing amount of business records, documents, publications, cultural artifacts, and science research data is created and stored in digital form only. This poses a great challenge to archival institutions that are in charge of preserving and managing such content for the long-term, for example public national and states archives, libraries, and scientific data centers:

• Obsolescence in technology can render digital data incomprehensible and unreadable after a few years due to dependencies on IT environments that have disappeared.
• Heterogeneity (data formats, metadata models, provenance) of acquired digital content makes it very difficult for archives to build integrated, collectively manageable holdings.
• Rapid change in business requirements of interfacing with customers (ingest, access, dissemination) is difficult to reconcile with long-term stability of archival content.

Digital Archives challenges

Digital Archives have to provide for sustained, long-term preservation of authenticity, integrity, usability and intelligibility of a continuously increasing amount of digital content that is acquired from a multitude of disparate sources. This makes it inevitable to obtain sufficient control of the data right from the start when the archives accepts responsibility. Obtaining sufficient control, however, is a complex, labor-intensive and high-risk task. It decides on long-term success, and inattentiveness will later lead to uncontrollable costs and loss of data.

• Data and metadata is received in multiple formats and must be validated, transformed and integrated into standard formats and models of the archives' collective holdings.
• Manual processes to assimilate the information are labor-intensive, error-prone, poorly traceable, and difficult to monitor.
• Technical complexity of ingest workflows must be hidden from business users without IT skills, or otherwise will impede their work, e.g. in archival appraisal and description.
• Metadata and data must be seamlessly handed over to disparate applications such as catalog and finding-aid databases, storage facilities, and end-user access systems.

Adeptia BPM solutions for Digital Archives

Aiming at the above challenges, Adeptia has developed focused functionality and expertise to automate and control all parts of ingest processes in Digital Archives, and to integrate them with disparate systems. Adeptia BPM Suite solutions for Digital Archives follow the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (OAIS, International Standard ISO 14721:2003). In particular, they enable archival institutions to design, implement, operate and manage effective Producer-Archive Interfaces according to the OAIS supplementary standard PAIMAS (Producer-Archive Interface Methodology Abstract Standard, ISO 20652:2006).

• Complete, visually designed ingest processes, including all data processing and human workflow tasks, are executed and monitored by a Suite-side process machine and a data repository that prevent data from being dispersed across local user workstations
• Human workflow tasks in an ingest process are executed via a normal Web browser. They are dynamically assigned to the required human users when needed, for example to handle errors and exceptions, make decisions, or review, appraise and enter data.
• Dozens of ingest processes can run independently, while a visual System Monitor shows their detailed status, and each user has a Human Task Manager that shows his or hers pending human tasks with assigned priorities, due dates, and state of work.
• Definition and management of multiple submission interfaces that automatically receive and validate data according to producer-specific transfer protocols and data formats.
• Automatic mapping, rule-based transformation and multi-source aggregation of XML and non-XML metadata from producer-specific formats into internal formats of the archives, including support for standards like, for example, PREMIS, EAD, MARC21, METS.
• Seamless integration of ingest processes with the popular tool JHOVE for automatic extraction of technical metadata and validation of file formats.
• Platform-agnostic UUID or URN identifiers are used to bind metadata and data objects in stand-alone Archival Information Packages that are stored in generic storage systems. Specific subsets of the full metadata are created and exported into the archives' catalog and description systems using their proprietary formats and interfaces.
• At the end of each ingest process execution, a detailed report is created for long-term documentation and traceability. Furthermore, all logging information remains online in a database for long-term business statistics and performance monitoring.

Benefits & advantages of an Adeptia BPM solution

With BPM Suite Adeptia introduces proven business process management technology into Digital Archives. It enables implementation of accurate, predictable and manageable ingest processes, and provides high agility in adapting them to rapidly changing business needs.

• Dramatic improvement of accuracy, data quality, stability and TCO in digital archives.
• 'Configure, not code' approach does not require software development to implement and modify ingest processes, thus reduces project costs and times.
• Fully Web-based user interface enables effortless integration of human users and workplaces, no matter where they are.
• Full process management life cycle management — design, implement, execute, monitor, optimize — is included in a comprehensive stand-alone product.
• Relies on open industry standards and uses pre-built, already solution-proven service components that are successfully deployed in diverse industries.
• Service-oriented, highly scalable and fully Java-based architecture that allows solutions to grow seamlessly with changing business needs and IT environments.