Via OCLC Research: “National libraries, government archives, broadcasting archives, scientific data archives, and university repositories are all investing substantial resources in the creation and maintenance of preservation metadata for the curation and long-term preservation of their digital collections. This preservation metadata is often considered as “contingency information” that is stored and maintained in the event of future need. An important function of preservation metadata is to understand what exactly is in the repository and to provide information that enables periodic check-ups and screenings for risks to long-term access. The Open Planets Foundation (OPF), a European-based organization that provides practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation to major libraries and archives with long-term access mandates, suggested the need for repositories to perform periodic “health checks” as a routine part of their preservation activities. Based on this suggestion, OCLC Research launched a Preservation Health Check Pilot to develop a general approach to monitor the health of the content of repositories based on the associated preservation metadata. In Phase 1 of this pilot, we developed a use case for preservation monitoring (identifying and tracking changes impacting a set of key properties of digital preservation). Our goal was to determine if the preservation metadata recorded and maintained by repositories could serve as a useful evidence base to support the operational workflow of repositories. Preservation Health Check: Monitoring Threats to Digital Repository Content presents the preliminary findings of our Phase 1 investigation of preservation monitoring. Written by Wouter Kool, Brian Lavoie and Titia van der Werf, the report suggests that there is an opportunity to use PREMIS preservation metadata as an evidence base to support a threat assessment exercise based on the Simple Property-Oriented Threat (SPOT) model.”