The Library of Congress Unlocks The Ultimate Archive System. Ken Weissman. Creative COW Magazine. 7 May 2010.
Article about the Library of Congress' Film Preservation Laboratory, where they are working on the ultimate archive system, starting with the restoration of films first printed on paper instead of film. One of the Library's main missions is to preserve America's memory for future generations of Americans, with no end point. They have a collection of 6.3 million audio-visual and film materials. They have a pilot project digitizing their paper print collection. They are designing the workflow and they use the concept of Preservation Index (preservation quality of a storage environment). The plan for now is to "scan the images, restore or preserve them as needed, then run them back to film, and put the film away at 25 degrees, 30% relative humidity, for practically forever. For most people, in practice, somewhere between 600 and 2000 years is beyond forever."
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Zettabytes overtake petabytes as largest unit of digital measurement. Heidi Blake. Telegraph.co.uk. 04 May 2010.
IDC, the technology consultancy released in the annual survey of the world's digital output. Humanity's total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year. The rapid growth of the "digital universe" has been caused by the explosion of social networking, online video, digital photography and mobile phones. Around 70 % of the world's digital content is created by individuals, but it is stored on content-sharing websites such as Flickr and YouTube. In 2007, they estimated that the digital universe was equivalent to 161,000 petabytes. [The term exabyte was used previously, it is larger than a petabyte.] They estimate the digital universe over the next decade will expand by a factor of 44. Read more about Sortabytes, Peptabytes, and Lumabytes.
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The Sun-Times Preserves Its Photo Archive by Selling It. Michael Miner. Chicago Reader. May 6, 2010.
John Rogers claims to have the world's largest private collection of vintage photos, about 30 million images. The Sun-Times has sold its archive of more than a million photos and negatives to Rogers, though they retain the intellectual rights. And Rogers is obliged to re-create the "entire library in digital searchable form". He is doing for the Sun-Times what they wanted to do, but couldn't afford. They estimated the processing would have taken many years and millions of dollars. Once the photo archive is digitized the Sun-Times will be able to tap a growing "aftermarket" for copies of old news photos. Rogers can digitize 200,000 images a month and hoping to go to 400,000. The creation of metadata is the expensive part.
The Rocky Mountain News is a good example of what can happen when a newspaper folds. The paper went out of business in February 2009. "All those photos were given to the Denver Public Library and are sitting in a basement in storage. The library can't sell them to me, and they don't have the money to digitize them. So they'll stay in the basement. I spoke to a very nice lady at the library. I said, 'Can they be accessed by the public?' She said, 'Not at this time.' 'Will they ever be digitized?' 'We don't have the funds to do it." Instead, he bought the Denver Post, so he considers the Rocky Mountain News pictures redundant.
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New program helps secure data. Science Alert. 28 April 2010.
Researchers at Monash University have developed the MyTARDIS/TARDIS program to give researchers a place to securely store research information. It also has the ability to share the most complex of scientific data through the internet. "The program records the data generated from an experiment, catalogues it, making it searchable, and transfers it back to the home institution, where the researcher can analyse the data using MyTARDIS, then make it publicly available on the TARDIS system alongside publication of the results in a scientific journal." [What better name?] The software has created a central place where researchers can exchange information rapidly and securely.
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"Link Rot" & Legal Resources on the Web: A 2010 Analysis. Sarah Rhodes. Legal Information Archive. May 2010.
The Legal Information Archive site has information about the Chesapeake Project, which contains government, policy, and legal information archived by several law libraries.
This particular article their third annual analysis of link rot among the original URLs for archived materials. The term "link rot" refers to a URL that no longer points to the resource that it originally did. The link may return a not found message, or may point to a different resource. The results of their evaluation of 1,266 born-digital online titles that were harvested, link rot was found to be present in:
- 2008: 48 of 579 URLs, 8.3 %
- 2009: 83 of 579 URLs, 14.3 %
- 2010: 160 of 579 URLs, 27.9 %
A results table shows that over 90 % of the top-level domains in the sample were state-government, .org, and .gov URLs.
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Imation launches broad line of secure removable storage devices. Lucas Mearian. ComputerWorld. May 3, 2010.
Imation announced a new line of products, four flash drives, two hard drives and an optical line of Blu-ray discs and removable tape cartridges, all with a range of encryption and security management tools.
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shortDOI™ Service. Web site. International DOI Foundation. May 6, 2010.
A new service is available to transform long DOI names , which are often very long strings. The service creates short handles of the name. A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a persistent name that can be give to internet resources, instead of a url which can change. The short DOI service returns a short cut that will resolve to the same object as the log DOI form.
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