The projects in this strand are geared towards institutions, groups or individuals who perceive themselves to have specific problems with the short, medium or long-term preservation of digital materials. The funding is designed to enable bidders to engage with the range of tools and methods that have been developed over the years to assist people with the sort of information management tasks that are relevant to sustaining the integrity of, and access to, digital materials over time.
The following resources contain references to many of the sorts of tools that are in scope for this strand. In aggregate, they should be fairly comprehensive of the variety of current tools available. They should not, however, be regarded as strictly prescriptive of the tools that should be used.
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) maintains a list containing short descriptions of tools and resources. This is lengthy and it will be apparent that it contains a variety of (sometimes duplicate) resources over a number of different categories. Many of them cannot strictly be classified as preservation tools but may well be useful in the broader context of information management tasks that will need to take place in conjunction with specified preservation actions. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/external/software-and-hardware/tools
The National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Programme (NDIIPP) based at the US Library of Congress also provides a very useful list of tools. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/resources/tools/index.html
Another useful resource that contains references to tools but which may also help to elucidate the principles and scope of preservation activity is provided by the KeepIt Project, a JISC Preservation Exemplar project funded as part of the INF11 Programme. http://wiki.eprints.org/w/KeepIt_Training_Resources
The Digital Curation Centre has created a summary diagram that helps to define how digital preservation and curation align with a lifecycle management approach to digital information.
b) to test the fitness for purpose of the available tools and to critique, validate and/or demonstrate their use