February 19, 2020

To start the new year, the FOLIO project released the Edelwise version of the platform. In this forum, you will hear an update on the development roadmap from Harry Kaplanian along with projections on development in functional areas. Matthew Addis from Arkivum will discuss his company’s work in adding support for special collections and archives with Perpetua, including a live demonstration.

Perpetua is a software solution for safeguarding, preservation and providing access to a wide range of digital content types that are often part of the library remit. This includes scholarly outputs, research data, special collections, archives, and institutional records.

Perpetua builds upon and integrates several community open source solutions including Archivematica for digital preservation and Access to Memory (AtoM) for archive information management and online access. Libraries can use Perpetua to store, preserve, manage and access their special collections and archives using archival standards (ISADG, etc.) and be able to describe both physical and digital content that they hold.

Arkivum has done an initial integration of Perpetua with FOLIO’s codex-search so that special collections in Perpetua are discoverable alongside other library resources in a uniform way in FOLIO. FOLIO users can search for content through the codex and then be directed to Perpetua where they can view the full record for matching content. If items are in digital form (e.g. images, audio, video, documents, etc.) then users can view/play them directly in Perpetua.

Matthew is interested in learning what FOLIO people think of what Arkivum has done so far, where it should go next, and how they can engage and participate in the FOLIO community.

Presenters

• Matthew Addis, Arkivum
• Harry Kaplanian, EBSCO Information Services

Is Perpetua an OSS for archiving solution ?

@matthewaddis: can you offer a brief introduction before the webinar next week?

@peter @massoud Perpetua is a software solution for digital preservation and long-term data management. It includes a range of capabilities including digital preservation, safe storage of data in multiple geographic locations, cataloging and metadata management, online access to digital content, compliance, and integration with external systems such as IR, CMS, EDRMS etc. Perpetua is available as a hosted solution that can be deployed on public or private cloud, for example AWS and Azure, and is provided as a managed service. It can be deployed on premise too.

Regarding the OSS question, Perpetua makes use of a lot of great open source technologies, e.g. Archivematica and AtoM from Artefactual for digital preservation and archival information management respectively. We use OSS as part of our platform, e.g. Kafka, MongoDB, keycloak and ElasticSearch. We also integrate with a range of external open source solutions such as ArchivesSpace, DSpace, EPrints - and of course FOLIO. However, whilst Perpetua makes good use of OSS, Perpetua as a whole is not itself OSS and is instead available as a SaaS solution from Arkivum and EBSCO. For example, there’s more details here: https://www.ebsco.com/sites/g/files/nabnos191/files/acquiadam-assets/Perpetua-by-Arkivum-Brochure.pdf

I’ll be providing an overview of Perpetua on the webinar before talking about how it’s integrated with FOLIO.

Thank you @matthewaddis for an informative answer. @peter

During your demo of Perpetua integration with Codex Search/ FOLIO, you gave an example of full text search (FTS) starting from a Codex Search request. Which index was used for the FTS ? was it Codex index via PostgreSQL FullText engine or was it an API call to ElasticSearch index via Perpetua ?

Thanks,
Massoud.

Hi @massoud

The full text search was done through an API call to Perpetua. Inside Perpetua we use ElasticSearch to index and search document content. When a user chooses to ‘search all fields’ using the codex-search app in FOLIO then we interpret this as meaning ‘search the full text index’ in Perpetua as well as ‘search all the metadata fields’ in Perpetua. Inside Perpetua, we do file format conversion on a range of file types. For example, WordPerfect docs, MS Word docs, powerpoints, emails etc. are all converted into PDF files for access (we always keep the originals and we also create preservation versions too). This means they all get full text indexed and hence the contents are searchable. This is what you were seeing in the demo - a range of original files had all been converted to PDF, including the contents of a PST email archive, and through the full text index these were all discoverable through the codex-search.

Best Regards,
Matthew

Thank you @matthewaddis for your swift response, @peter @attia_alshareef

Perpetua integration story with FOLIO surely broke the ice on making the dreamed for possibilities catered around FOLIO vision coming true. Thank you EBSCO, IndexData and Arkivum.

Mathew… when do expect the Perpetua FOLIO app source code becomes publicly available for developers ?

Thanks,
Massoud.