Friday, August 28, 2009

Digital Preservation Matters - 27 August 2009

Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families. Society of American Archivists, Berlin State Library. August 21, 2009.

Archivists have expressed the need for a standard structure to record and exchange information about the creators of archival materials. Draft information and a schema (EAC-CPF) are available at this site and feedback is welcome.



10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets. Sarah Perez. ReadWriteWeb. August 11, 2009.

Tweets have an expiration date on them and become unsearchable after a week and a half, though that may be reduced as more content is added. Several options for saving these are explored.



Startup crafts DVD-Rs for the 31st century. Rik Myslewski. The Register. 23 July 2009.

The Millenniata company has developed a new DVD-R technology that it claims will be readable for 1,000 years. The Millennial Disc Series is designed to eliminate the need for governments, financial institutions, libraries, and others to regularly refresh and rotate their digital-data collections. The data is etched into a "carbon layer with the hardness of a diamond". It requires a specialized writer and discs [but readable on any DVD player]. The discs are stable from minus 100° to plus 200° centigrade, and are dunked in liquid nitrogen as part of the testing. These discs are one element of a data preservation strategy.



“Why you never should leave it to the University”. JISC-PoWR website. Blog Post by Brian Kelly on August 19th, 2009.

Discussion of an article about a person who lost his academic website after the School of Business had redesigned their web site. With the changes, the person lost about “ten years worth of virtually daily updates were gone That included most of the manuscripts for my published work. The same thing happened to lecture notes, powerpoint slides, course documentations, useful links, etc. It had all disappeared from the Web!”. The issues need to be discussed, and in the current climate that must include the costs: “disk storage may be cheap but management of content is not”. The JISC archive has a number of other interesting posts about preservation of blogs, websites, wikis; and preservation policies.



Digital Preservation in the Wild. Tim Donohue. Slide show. July 21, 2009.

Thirty slides about digital preservation. Some notes from it:

  • It is not about the technology.
  • You don’t have to preserve everything to the fullest extent if you say you aren’t.
  • Say what you do, do what you say.
  • We acknowledge our gaps



Labeling Library Archives Is a Game at Dartmouth College. Marc Beja. The Chronicle of Higher Education. August 25, 2009.

A digital-humanities professor is creating an Internet-based game where users create descriptive tags for library images to improve searching. Adding keywords can be costly. This could be a way for the library to generate metadata. Users points could gain points as they compete to label images that match the keywords of other players. It is being funded by NEH and should be available next summer. [Some image sites already have similar functionality.]



‘Digital-Only’ Confusion in Scholarly Publishing: American Chemical Society. Barbara Quint. Information Today. July 23, 2009.

What happens if (or when) scholarly publishing reaches the tipping point of going "digital-only"? Publishers have been creating digital versions for some time, but some are now moving to only digital versions. The American Chemical Society journals are all available electronically but none are going only digital. “Studies have shown that more and more users now prefer the digital mode.” They will be publishing two titles next year that not in print form. They will continue to monitor the situation, but for “today, and throughout 2010, online access and print subscriptions both remain options.”

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