Back to Basics: The Minimum Preservation Tool

This paper presents the Minimum Preservation Tool (MPT), designed and developed by the British Library to provide a basic and local technical digital preservation storage environment for collections awaiting ingest to a more formal digital preservation repository. The MPT can satisfy fundamental preservation storage requirements that are not typically otherwise supported in a standard corporate technical environment more focused on cyber-security. Replication, checksum generation and validation, and regular reporting are all key features of the MPT, written as a set of Python Utilities and freely available on Github. MPT is an entry-level tool that lowers the bar for early participation in preservation endeavors, in contrast with larger scale and more expensive, complex end-to-end technical solutions.