A beta version of the Automatic Obsolescence Notification Service
(AONS) has been launched as a pilot service. The service provides support
to repositories anywhere around Australia (or in fact globally) for
managing format obsolescence of digital materials.
Users can register with the service by providing a URL to a repository's
format scan summary. The AONS service will display the summary and allow a
repository manager to compare the formats of items in their repository
with information from format registries such as PRONOM and Library of
Congress. These registries flag any formats that are likely to become
obsolete. Repository managers can then make curation decisions about any
items at risk, such as upgrading their formats.
By downloading and installing an AONS locally, an institution can also
take advantage of a pilot risk metrics implementation. This feature
requires manual data entry in order to assign weightings to particular
formats to create a risk profile for each format.
Over time, by sharing this information between AONS instances it may be
possible to build up accurate risk profiles for many common formats.
The AONS software is the result of the AONS II project funded under APSR
and developed by David Pearson, David Levy and Matthew Walker from the
National Library of Australia (NLA) with an administrative user interface
developed by David Berriman at ANU.
The software is able to be downloaded from Sourceforge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aons and a mailing list is also available
for support and feedback. As this is a beta release we welcome feedback to
the Sourceforge mailing list to inform our testing which will continue
until mid-September.
Please try out the pilot service by sending an email to [log in to unmask]
to register with the service, and tell us which institution you are from.
Any quieries can also be sent to this address. Further information about
the AONS Project can be seen at http://www.apsr.edu.au/aons2/
Margaret Henty
Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories
www.apsr.edu.au
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