Earlier this month the Universidad de las Islas Baleares, the pilot training academy PANAMEDIA and LIBNOVA announced that they will be working together on a new research programme in developing and applying a framework based on aviation security and quality assurance risk assessment for the long term digital preservation.
During the last PASIG2019 in Mexico City, the Head of the Digitization Unit and Open Access at the Universidad de las Islas Baleares Eduard del Valle, gave a most impactful talk called «Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Learning from aviation to prevent disasters” on how the aviation industry deals with risk assessment and applies procedures to mitigate risk based on the Aviation Safety Management Systems (aka SMS) and later spoke about how digital preservation methodology would benefit in learning and applying similar regulations taken from the aviation safety management systems. The NDSA (National Digital Stewardship Alliance) welcomed this initiative and asked the Universidad de las Islas Baleares to join the NDSA, being the first university outside of the United States to be accepted. This research programme is great news for the development of the NDSA.
Once again LIBNOVA is pushing the boundaries through research. Nearly three years ago LIBNOVA started a research project devoted to machine learning and neural networks, what is commonly known as artificial intelligence. The research programme quickly began to show very promising results. These results paved the way for LIBNOVA to receive a European Research grant focussed solely on machine learning. Slowly but thoroughly these innovations have made their way into LIBNOVA products making LIBSAFE one of the most advanced technological digital preservation platforms available today. For example, the modules that detect and prevent potential threats during intake using deep ingestion scanning are the result of the extensive technological research made by the LIBNOVA teams on artificial intelligence. We have to remember that LIBSAFE is probably the most advanced and flexible digital preservation system since it can cater to complex entities or fulfill simpler needs, just by simply activating the needed modules.
In the upcoming months, we’ll closely watch how researchers work within this new research programme. We’re looking forward to hearing from the teams on their progress and we will relate on how this latest research will impact the digital preservation field and what proposals they might take back to the NDSA.
