Evaluating preservation strategies for electronic theses and dissertations

Digital preservation has turned into a pressing challenge for institutions having the obligation to preserve digital objects over years. A range of tools exist today to support the variety of preservation strategies such as migration or emulation. Yet, di®erent preservation requirements across institutions and settings make the decision on which solution to implement very di±cult. The Austrian National Library will have to preserve electronic theses and dissertations provided as PDF ¯les and is thus investigating potential preservation solutions. The DELOS Digital Preservation Testbed is used to evaluate various alternatives with respect to speci¯c requirements. It provides an approach to make informed and accountable decisions on which solution to implement in order to preserve digital objects for a given purpose.We analyse the performance of various preservation strategies with respect to the speci¯ed requirements for the preservation of master theses and present the results.