Weekly readings - 6 October 2006

Fedora and the Preservation of University Records Project. Eliot Wilczek, Kevin Glick. Project web site. September 2006.

This project examines electronic records preservation research and theory with digital library practice. The three areas looked at are:

1. Requirements for trustworthy recordkeeping systems and preservation activities,

2. Ingesting records into a preservation system, and

3. Maintaining records in a preservation system.

The project provides twelve reports and an ingest prototype tool. The sections include:

1. Introduction: Overview, model, concerns

2. Ingest: Ingest guide, projects, tools

3. Maintain: Guide, checklist

4. Findings: Analysis of Fedora’s ability to support preservation activities, conclusions, future directions

A few notes from the conclusion that caught my interest:

· The OAIS Reference Model is the overarching conceptual structure for preservation activities and systems.

· The Ingest Guide and Maintain Guide translate the requirements into actions in those areas

· Long-term preservation of archival university records is a difficult and costly endeavor.

· Because of resource costs, most archives must develop partnerships to successfully preserve electronic records and digital objects.

· Archivists must become a step removed from the records they manage if they are going to preserve them.

· Archivists must work with record creators as they create their records to preserve them

CEATEC: Hitachi Maxell develops wafer-thin storage disc. Martyn Williams. Computerworld. October 04, 2006.

The stacked volumetric optical disc (SVOD) is less than a tenth of a millimeter thick, and this thinness could give the technology an advantage over current CDs, DVDs and blue-laser discs, all of which are 1.2 mm thick. Many of the discs can be stacked together to realize a large data storage capacity in a small space.

New DVD could end format war. CNN. September 27, 2006.

New Medium Enterprises said it can produce a multiple-layer DVD disk containing one film in different, competing formats, such as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

This follows a patent by three employees at Warner Bros. in which these are complementary patents. By being able to put the same material on a single disk in the two competing formats this will resolve consumer’s concerns. The first prototype using the technology should be ready by early 2007. NME has also created the technology for the machines to read and write the disk. The technology can create DVD disks with up to 10 different layers that were still readable. Data on a DVD are stored at different depths depending on the technology: Blu-Ray discs store information 0.1 millimeter from the surface while HD-DVD discs store it at 0.6 millimeters.

With technology, records seem made to be forgotten. Charles Piller. Los Angeles Times. Sept. 18, 2006.

An article discussing the loss of digital items. It affects households as well as archivists. There is no list of lost records, but archivists continue to find examples. "If we don't solve the problem, our time will not become part of the past. It will largely vanish." Archivists expect that the current presidential administration records will be less complete than those of Lincoln. NARA is creating a system to preserve information, but some feel that each migration of data will lose some meaning. In other ways, each new migration generates more data which increases the complexity of the problem.

New 1TB Desktop External HD Goes for $500. Chris Preimesberger. eWeek. October 2, 2006.

Buffalo Technology has announced a new external hard drive which ranges from 500GB to 1.5TB. It has two drives that can be set up in a RAID-1 configuration for reliability. It is intended to make storage simple for end users. It comes with data encryption technology to prevent unauthorized access. The cost is $249 for 500GB up to $999 for 1.5TB.

Old E-Mail Keeps Getting More Expensive. Kim Nash. eWeek. September 26, 2006.

We all know it is expensive to go through old files and backup tapes looking for emails that are required for lawsuits or audits. Sometimes the cost of producing the files can be shared. But in a recent case, the judge ruled they: “should have reasonably anticipated having to produce all the former employees’ e-mails, and therefore kept that data in a form that was quick and easy to access – i.e. not archived on backup tapes stored offsite.”