Digital Preservation Bake Off Challenge

The Digital Preservation Bake Off Challenge is framed as an open, light-hearted competition in which solution providers, developers and coders can demonstrate their products and tools while allowing participants to observe the process and verify the claims they make.

There’s no actual baking.

The term ‘Bake Off’ describes a technology showcase in which a group of ‘judges’ (‘tasting panel’) provide a common challenge, based on a common set of inputs and requirements, to a group of technologists (‘bakers’). The requirements are based on real-world situations which are of wide enough relevance to be recognized by the global digital preservation community. They relate to any number of digital preservation themes, such as integrating digital preservation into line-of-business systems, thorny content types, metadata extraction and handling, meeting user requirements, scaling up, web-archiving, or achieving greater efficiencies while not sacrificing quality of outcomes. They relate to end-to-end systems produced by large teams as well as to specific tools and applications from individual hackers and developers.

The Great Digital Preservation Bake Off will be staged in three rounds, which, perhaps inevitably, we are describing as ‘Courses’:

• The Starter Course includes all the actions that happen before a digital object is transferred to or ingested into an archive repository;
• The Main Course includes actions once a collection has been transferred into an archive repository;
• The Dessert Course concerns all aspects of access and user engagement with data that has been preserved.

Challengers are welcome to participate in as many courses as they like. Each course involves a series of tasks to be performed with a common menu of ingredients in front of an expert ‘Tasting Panel’ comprising digital preservation experts drawn from the iPres Program Committee and audience.

Leading up to the iPres 2022 Digital Preservation Bake Off, the bakers can decide which of the challenges (‘course’) they want to participate in and what of their standard toolkits and workflows they would like to demonstrate. Challengers can choose which ingredients to work with, allowing them to specialize on their favorites or can attempt ‘The Works’. They can demonstrate a complete solution, a single tool or a chain of tools assembled into a workflow. During the bake off sessions at iPres 2022 the ‘bakers’ demonstrate their results to the judges as well as the on-site and remote audience. Three ‘mystery ingredients’ will be revealed during the session and while there is no requirement to make use of them, we strongly encourage the ‘bakers’ to refer to one or several in their demos. After each demonstration the audience will have the chance to ask questions and give feedback, followed by the Tasting Panel judging the success of the dish and awarding prizes accordingly. In this way the bakers can demonstrate their systems and tools based on real world problems selected by the community. They are able to learn from the experience. The Bake Off will be more interactive and interesting than a standard pre-prepared tool demo!

The Tasting Panel will take into account that large integrated solutions are pitched against small but tightly focused implementations. To extend the metaphor, they will understand the difference between a gourmet banquet in a fine restaurant and a perfect cup of coffee which sets you up for the day. The Panel will also take on board feedback from the audience, including from the challengers themselves.