Digital Preservation Matters - 21 November 2008

Archives: Challenges and Responses. Jim Michalko. OCLC. 6 November 2008. [pdf]

Interesting view of ‘The Collective Collection’. A framework for representing content.

• Published Content: books, journals, newspapers, scores, maps, etc.
• Special Collections: Rare books, local histories, photos, archives, theses, objects, etc.
• Open Web Content: Web resources, open source software, newspaper archives, images, etc.
• Institutional Content: ePrints, reports, learning objects, courseware, manuals, research, data, etc.

Describes an End-to-End Archival Processing Flow:
Select>Deliver>Describe>Acquire>Appraise>Survey>Disclose>Discover

Managing the Collective Collection: Shared Print. Constance Malpas. OCLC. 6 November 2008. [pdf]

Concern that many print holdings will be ‘de-duped’ and that there will not be enough to maintain the title. Some approaches are offsite storage, digitization, distributed print archives. “Without system-wide frameworks in place, libraries will be unable to make decisions that effectively balance risk and opportunity with regard to de-accessioning of print materials.” The average institutional holdings for in WorldCat: for serials=13; for books=9. Up to 40% of book titles have a single institution holding. There is a need for a progressive preservation strategy.

Ancient IBM drive rescues Apollo moon data. Tom Jowitt. Computerworld. November 12, 2008.

Data gathered by the Apollo missions to the moon 40 years ago looks like it may be recovered after all, thanks to a donation of an “ancient” IBM tape drive. The mission data had been recorded onto 173 data tapes, which had then been 'misplaced' before they could be archived. The tapes have been found but now they did not have a drive to read the data; one has been found at the Australian Computer Museum Society. It will require some maintenance and to restore to working condition. "It's going to have to be a custom job to get it working again," which may take several months.

Google to archive 10 million Life magazine photos. Heather Havenstein. Computerworld. November 18, 2008.

Google plans to archive as many as 10 million images from the Life magazine archives, and about 20% are already online. Some of the images date back to the 1750s; many have never been published. The search archive is here.

PREMIS With a Fresh Coat of Paint. Brian F. Lavoie. D-Lib Magazine. May/June 2008.

Highlights from the Revision of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata. This looks at PREMIS 2.0 and the changes made:

• Update to the data model clarifying relation between Rights and Agents, and Events and Agents
• Completely revised and expanded Rights entity: a more complete description of rights statements
• A detailed, structured set of semantic units to record information about significant properties
• Added the ability to accommodate metadata from non-PREMIS specifications
• A suggested registry to be created of suggested values for semantic units