Weekly readings - 3 February 2006

Libraries fear digital lockdown. Ian Youngs. BBC News. 3 February 2006.

The British Library has warned that digital rights management (DRM) controls may block some legitimate uses of digital books and journals and that they may not be accessible in the future when technology evolves. The estimate that by 2020, 90% of newly published work will be available digitally. If these works are locked, it could cause problems in the future. "It is probable that no key would still exist to unlock the DRMs. For libraries this is serious.” Libraries, as “custodians of human memory”, would need to “keep digital works in perpetuity and may need to be able to transfer them to other formats in order to preserve them and make the content fully accessible and usable once out of copyright.”


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Film preservation. Stephen Galloway. Hollywood Reporter. Dec. 20, 2005.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study is housed in a 118,000-square-foot former television studio that has become a state-of-the-art hub for film preservation and restoration. The activity has increased dramatically recently because of government and private funding that has provided the means to keep film from becoming extinct. "There is more money and more public awareness about preservation in general." The center, which houses over 100,000 films, works on about 200-300 films per year and have improved or re-mastered 2,000 titles, 1,000 of them have had full restorations. There is also a commercial market for maintaining these films, so some of the studios are beginning to invest in preservation instead of turning the material over to archives or the public. Creating an inventory and finding the materials is the most challenging part of the process. Restoring the sound can be more challenging than restoring the picture on some movies. A major issue in preserving movies would be the creation of a standard to store the movies digitally instead of on celluloid. The Digital Motion Picture Archival Project, comprised of studio and archival experts, met in June.

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Lossless JP2 Meta-Standard for Video Archiving. Websites. January 18, 2006.

These two websites contain information on Jpeg2000 and video archiving. The first is a new forum for discussing the documents and issues. The second site contains some documents that explain the MPEG-A Process, and overview of the approach for creating a new Meta-Standard for Long-Term Digital Video Preservation, and the first draft of the standard.
Follow-on activity - Towards an MPEG-A meta-standard for lossless JPEG-2000-based video compression.

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Trends in archiving. Raju Buddharaju. Computerworld (Singapore). December 2005.

There are a number of issues to be considered when archiving web sites. The technological issues include obsolescent formats and access mechanisms, legal and organizational issues such as copyright issues and managing intellectual property. Economic issues include long term viability and the cost of web archiving. There are some archiving models that look at these factors; the models look at closed and open archives, and also look at collection schemes such as selective archives, thematic, or deposit and domain archives.

There are four major archiving tasks, such as, a search and selection process, an ingest process, a storage facility, and access mechanisms. The tools used for each of these tasks vary for each model. For example, for closed web archives, the archived web sites are pre-selected, and with a closed group, getting copyright issues are simpler. Open archives need policy guidelines on which web sites to archive, how much to gather, what the copyright processes are, and how often to get the web site information. Ingest mechanisms could include converting original formats into archival formats to make storage and access easier.

There are a number of web archiving initiatives in place, such as Pandora in Australia, the Austrian Registration of On-Line Archive Project, Preservation and Access to Czech Resources on the Internet, Net Archive Project in Denmark, EVA project in Finland, BnF’s project for web archiving in France, Warp project in Japan, Paradigma project in Norway, Kulturarw3 project in Sweden, the Domain UK project, and Minerva in the US. Some focus on archiving the country’s specific domains. But in general at least 40 per cent of the links in these web sites refer to web sites outside of the country’s specific domains. As an alternative, international or consortium-based web archiving approaches are used. These projects archive websites be either making an archival copy, or by taking a snapshot of the web site periodically.