Much of my research before joining the University of Toronto in 2013 focused on scalable decision support for digital preservation of large-scale digital collections. Together with partners across Europe in the projects PLANETS (in which I completed my doctorate) and then SCAPE (in which I was Co-PI), I designed and developed integrated software systems to support risk detection, monitoring and decision making in digital preservation. The preservation planning tool PLATO and the expanded SCAPE preservation suite won seven international awards between 2008 and 2014. Most of this work is summarized in two journal articles – the first describes the overarching design of the SCAPE suite, the second evaluates it. (Both articles received Highly Commended Paper awards.)
A second project departed from this somewhat – in BenchmarkDP, my collaborators and I set out to develop the first coherent, systematic approach to assess and compare digital preservation processes, systems, and organizational capabilities. I am not quite sure if we succeeded in that, but the results laid the groundwork for data-intensive curation and sustainability design.