Digital Preservation Matters - March 2, 2010

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation. Katherine Skinner, Matt Schultz. Educopia Institute. February 2010. [156 p. PDF]

Excellent guide created by MetaArchive, who developed the first private LOCKSS network in 2004. This work examines distributed digital preservation, successful strategies and new models . It will help others to join or establish a private LOCKSS network. It discusses the network architecture, technical and organization considerations, content selection and ingest, administration and copyright practices in the network. A distributed digital preservation system must preserve, not just back-up. The preservation process of contributing, preserving, and retrieving content depends upon the institution’s diligence. Ingested content is preserved not just through replication, but by the caches through a set of polling, voting, and repairing processes. Distributed digital preservation, by definition, requires communication and collaboration across multiple locations and between numerous staff.

The software provides bit-level preservation for digital objects of any file type or format, but it can also provide a set of services to make the preserved files usable in the future, such as normalizing and migrating. The MetaArchive network is a dark archive with no public interface; communication between caches is secure. Organizations collaborating on preserving digital content must examine the roles and responsibilities of members, address essential management, policy, and staffing questions, develop standards, and define the network’s sphere of activity. Ingest, monitoring, and recovery of content are critical steps for preserving the content.

Some interesting quotes from the guide:

• Paradoxically, there is simultaneously far greater potential risk and far greater potential security for digital collections
• many cultural memory organizations are today seeking third parties to take on the responsibility for acquiring and managing their digital collections. The same institutions would never consider outsourcing management and custodianship of their print and artifact collections;
• A great deal of content is in fact routinely lost by cultural memory organizations as they struggle with the enormous spectrum of issues required to preserve digital collections,
• A true digital preservation program will require multi-institutional collaboration and at least some ongoing investment to realistically address the issues involved in preserving information over time.
• One of the greatest risks we run in not preserving our own digital assets for ourselves is that we simultaneously cease to preserve our own viability as institutions.

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Encouraging Open Access. Steve Kolowich. Inside Higher Ed. March 2, 2010.

Conversations about open access to journal articles currently revolve around policy, not technology; about if the content should be made available, not how. “Without content, an IR is just a set of empty shelves.” A new model of repository focuses on giving researchers an online “workspace” within the repository where they can upload and preserve different versions of an article they are working on. The idea is to make publishing articles to the open repository a natural extension of the creative process. This is based on a survey where professors wanted:

• to be able to work with co-authors easily,
• to keep track of different versions of the same document, and
• to make their work more visible
• all while doing as little extra work as possible.

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In the digital age, librarians are pioneers. Judy Bolton-Fasman. The Boston Globe. February 10, 2010.

Book review of This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All By Marilyn Johnson.

• Among information professionals, Johnson notes there are librarians and archivists: “Librarians were finders [of information]. Archivists were keepers.’’ But the information revolution is affecting both.
• The digital age is making possible the creation of searchable databases of archives, but it’s also making information, especially on the Internet, more ephemeral and harder to collect.
• Information archivists “capturing history before it disappears because of a broken link or outdated software.”
• in a world where technology moves life at a breathtaking pace, “where information itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we need librarians more than ever’’ to help point the way to the best, most reliable sources.

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Installing OAIS Software: Archivematica. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. February 1, 2010.

One of several reports on open source tools the blog author is evaluating to help with ingest, storage, and access processes in archives. This post looks at Archivematica, and he likes the supportable model for facilitating archival work with electronic records. It is a Ubuntu-based virtual appliance which can exist alongside preservation tools on other systems. It can be installed locally and in a variety of ways. Worth looking in to.

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IBM announces massive NAS array for the cloud. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. February 11, 2010.

IBM has announced SONAS, an enterprise-class network-attached storage array capable of scaling from 27TB to 14 petabytes under a single name space. It is designed to provide access to data anywhere any time. The policy-driven automation storage software allows an institution to predefine where data is placed, when it is created, where and when it moves to in the storage hierarchy, where it's copied for disaster recovery, and when it will be eventually deleted.

Digital Preservation Matters - February 22, 2010

Appraisal Actions and Decisions. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. February 15, 2010.

Most development work on digital repositories focuses on the requirements of the OAIS reference model. But OAIS doesn’t say how records should be selected for deposit. While each archive has a different focus, selecting records for inclusion in an archive is heavily debated. The appraisal process requires careful and intelligent decision making by a person. When appraising electronic records, several tools are needed:

• examine, identify, compare, delete, rename, and reorganize records
  
• manage information concerning records surveys/assessments.
• manage submission agreements
• ensure that appraisal actions are documented.

A set of tools is needed to examine, characterize, delete and possibly, reorder records quickly. This would make it easier to decide if the records are within the scope of the archives policy, then take appropriate actions concerning them.

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E-Library Economics. Steve Kolowich. Inside Higher Ed. February 10, 2010.

Two studies from the Council on Library and Information Resources examine the implications of libraries changing to digital collections. Libraries seem to be headed in the direction of primarily digital infrastructures but the journey is slow going. Digital standards, such as those for eBooks, are still changing. “While they enjoy the searchability of electronic documents and databases, academics still prefer holding a book in their hands to read it.” The studies point to an average of $4.26 per book per year to keep the book on the shelf. The cost for digital is much less; the digital media repository Hathi Trust stores five million copies at between $0.15 and $0.40 per volume, per year. Books in high-density storage facilities cost only $0.86 per year to keep in usable condition. “The administrators who provide library budgets may be reluctant to fund new facilities to house print collections and may question large expenditures to support both print and electronic formats. Library directors must consider not only the immediate expectations of faculty, but also the long-term goals for the library.”

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Studies Cite Argument for, Resistance to Increased Digital Library Collections. Library Journal. February 11, 2010.

A reaction to the E-Library Economics article. The keys to success are to communicate with and educate the students and faculty why the changes are important; to emphasize the preservation of resources, security, and the benefits; and to make the electronic resources available without barriers. One concern, the “move to electronic collections requires certainty about access to digital collections and their persistence. Also, removing books would not change the fixed costs of the building. The report authors also acknowledge “that the business model for ebooks remains unsettled and that print plays an important role for resources that don't yet work so well in digital format."

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Using DROID for Appraisal. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. February 17, 2010.

DROID is a tool to help archivists identify file formats. But it may be valuable in the appraisal process to help an archivist understand the components of a records series. By running DROID and analyzing the reports, it is possible to identify particular file formats outside of the proposed collection scope, especially useful if they are deep in a directory structure. Specific examples and processes used are outlined.

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Film Institute launches first digital archive in Wales. BBC News. 9 February 2010.

The British Film Institute has launched its first "digital jukebox" in Wales, allowing people to access its archive. The Mediatheque is already available in England. The system allows people to watch films and TV programs, currently 1,500 titles, from the national archive free of charge; 85% of the titles had not been released on DVD or online.

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Innovation: We can't look after our data – what can? Tom Simonite . New Scientist. 11 February 2010.

Anyone worried about the fragility of digital data and civilization’s chances to survive would do well to look to their own data stores first. “Most of us today are blithely heading for our own personal data disasters” because of benign neglect. Data is often lost more from disorganization than from a technological catastrophe, though that happens too. Two possible approaches are mentioned: the Self Archiving Legacy Toolkit (SALT); and the Pergamum project. We are in need of tools to help with diverse, disorganized digital archives which are becoming the norm.

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Court Finds E-Mails Stored on Old Archiving System Reasonably Accessible; Costs Exaggerated. Kroll Ontrack. Recent ESI Court Decisions. February 2010.

A court case where the defendant argued that e-mails archived on the company's "cumbersome" old system were not reasonably accessible. “The court found that the plaintiff should not be disadvantaged since the defendant, a "sophisticated" company, chose not to migrate the e-mails to the now-functional archival system and thus determined that the e-mails were reasonably accessible.”

Digital Preservation Matters - February 16, 2010

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Library of Congress. February 2010.
The Library of Congress has:

• established an internal process to create open source software.
• has created a new series that looks at innovative approaches to digital preservation and access. It starts “On the Leading Edge,” with a look at DigitalPreservationEurope.
• has released a or video “Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation”

The International Internet Preservation Consortium has released a web archives registry. The registry provides an overview of member web archiving efforts as well as access. It currently includes 21 archives from around the world.

ALA is launching its first Preservation Week on May 9 - 15, 2010.

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Results of Digital Preservation Costs Survey now available. Neil Beagrie. 03 February 2010.
The Keeping Research Data Safe 2 survey of digital preservation cost information is now available. The project was to identify institutions with cost information for preservation of digital research data and to conduct a survey of them. The collections will then be the basis of further study. The Summary Analysis of Data Survey Responses can be downloaded as a Word file, as well as each survey response. Survey questions included:

• Principal data file formats included
• Size of collection
• Identification of which types of costs they were tracking

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The Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing. Directory of Open Access Journals. February 5, 2010.
The online guide is now available and updated. It provides practical information and tools for those producing independent Open Access journals. The guide sections discuss: Planning, Setup, Launch, Publish, and Manage. It refers to several other guides, and provides an input ability for others to add their experiences.

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British Library to offer free ebook downloads. Richard Brooks. Times Online. February 7, 2010.
Over 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library will be available for free downloads this spring. The library, in partnership with Microsoft, began digitizing items several years ago. They will be available online for free, but printed copies will also be available from Amazon. The online and printed versions will look like the rare 19th-century editions. “Altogether, 35%-40% of the library’s 19th-century printed books — now all digitised — are inaccessible in other public libraries and are difficult to find in second-hand or internet bookshops.” They hope to extend this effort to books out of copyright dating from the early 20th century.

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Doc or Docx? Which Office Format to Use. Minda Zetlin. Inc. Feb 15, 2010.
The new Office formats have caused user irritation in trying to read the documents. Microsoft has free conversion programs but many refuse to use them. The newer file formats have an x at the end of the file extension, meaning they are based on Extensible Markup Language or XML. With docx, pptx, and .xlsx, Microsoft made a fundamental change with how the files are created. The files also use file compression to reduce the file size and to hopefully reduce the possibility of the full document becoming corrupted. Some suggest keeping the .doc format as the default. Some “save every document in three formats: .doc, .docx, and .pdf.”

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The National Geospatial Digital Archive: A Collaborative Project to Archive Geospatial Data. Tracey Erwin; Julie Sweetkind-Singer. GIS and Science. February 8, 2010.
This is a collaborative project to collect, preserve, and provide long-term access to at-risk geospatial data. he project partners created preservation environments at both universities, created and populated a format registry, collected more than ten terabytes of geospatial data and imagery, wrote collection development policies governing acquisitions, and created legal documents designed to manage the content and the relationship between the two nodes.” The article was published in the Journal of Map And Geography Libraries. The difference with geospatial data is that it may reside in complex, multi-file objects, and that it “can remain dynamic indefinitely due to the lifetime of the generating program and the need to be periodically reprocessed.” One of the preservation strategies is to attempt to create multiple copies, with varying capabilities. Preserving context is difficult because the data is voluminous. “It is now understood that access is inextricably linked to preservation.” “The results of the NGDA experience are multifaceted. In practical terms, the successful ingestion of data into working repositories is the most significant outcome.”

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Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge. Tom Simonite, Michael Le Page. 02 February 2010.
Recent doomsday article about the loss of digital data. “The current strategy for preserving important data is to store several copies in different places, sometimes in different digital formats. This can protect against localised disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes, but it will not work in the long run.” “There really is no digital standard that could be counted on in the very long term….”

Digital Preservation Matters - February 8, 2010

Online Recordkeeping: It's All in a Name. Mimi Dionne. Internet Evolution. February 2, 2010.

The born-digital record lifecycle has five stages, in chronological order: creation; distribution and use; storage and maintenance; retention; and disposition or archival preservation. All five stages are important. One of the best practices for born-digital records is uniform file naming protocols, including location, to encourage strong content management. These should align with the records retention policies. Organizations are better off if they select the information they need to retain and destroy what they don’t need. “The benefits of implementing a records program that includes regular records destruction have far-reaching influence not only on compliance issues and maintenance of a company’s IT environment but also the health of its budget.”

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SPIE to Preserve E-Books in Portico. Press Release. Portico. 2 February 2010.

Portico has agreed with SPIE (the international society for optics and photonics) to preserve its collection of e-books, currently 93 items. It already participates with Portico to preserve its e-journals. Portico now holds over 34,000 e-books and over 10,000 e-journals. The SPIE has also announced the launch of their digital library, which includes 120 SPIE Press titles from the Field Guides, Monographs, and Tutorial Texts series.

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Long-Term Preservation Of Web Archives – Experimenting With Emulation And Migration Methodologies. Andrew Stawowczyk Long. IIPC. December 2009. [54 p. PDF]

The decision to emulate or migration are largely based on personal beliefs, rather than on any particular evidence. We do not know which of these is more useful in the long term. All objects change over time, so ensuring long-term, useful access to collections requires we first define the most important aspects of an object that needs to be preserved. The “Preservation Intent” may be useful for this, which is what the institution intends to preserve for any given digital object and for how long. Also needed is the creator’s intent, the contextual information and the technical information.

Two possible approaches for institutions may be:

1. preserve digital objects over the next twenty years;
2. find means of preserving objects for longer.

Or an approach may include both: preserve items for 20 years while the search for longer preservation mechanisms continues. “Significant properties” means the properties of a digital object that are essential to the representation of the intended meaning of that object.

The author does not recommend either emulation or migration as a perfect solution to the problem at this current time. Also, their findings and recommendations include:

1. There are no tools suitable for long-term preservation of very large web archives
2. All preservation actions need to be based on a clearly defined “Preservation Intent”
3. Migration and emulation offer some time extensions to for short term access to digital objects.
4. Emulation seems to present higher risks as a long-term preservation methodology.

It is not possible to preserve it all. Priorities need to be established for practical, long-term preservation solutions. The best hope for adequate long-term preservation, lies in continuous and systematic work, researching various preservation methodologies, and improving our understanding of the future use of web archives.

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Is NAND flash about to hit a dead end? Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. February 4, 2010.

IM Flash Technologies has said that shrinking the technology much further may not be possible because of problems with bit errors and reliability. The number of electrons that can be stored in the memory cell decreases with each generation of flash memory, making it more difficult for the cells to reliably retain data.

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CNRI Digital Object Repository™. Corporation for National Research Initiatives. 19 January 2010.

(CNRI) has developed a new version of its Digital Object Repository Software. It is open source, flexible, scalable, secure, and has a suite that provides a common interface for accessing all types of digital objects. Redundancy is supported by a mirroring system with software to ensure that replicated objects are kept in sync.

Digital Preservation Matters - January 29, 2010

Preserving Born-Digital Legal Materials…Where to Start? Sarah Rhodes . VoxPopuLII. Cornell Law School. January 10, 2010.

Article well worth reading. We have already all heard the arguments for investing in digital preservation, how the digital world is ubiquitous, how ephemeral digital data is. “There is no denying the urgent need for libraries to take on the task of preserving our digital heritage.” Law libraries have a critically important role to play in preservation. The digital preservation field will always be in a constant state of change because technology is always changing. But there has been progress in creating tools, services, and best practices.

In the law libraries that they looked at, less than 7% of the digital preservation projects involved preserving born-digital materials. The remaining 93% involved preserving digital files created by digitizing physical originals. But those who responded to the survey said, by a margin of 2 to 1, that born-digital materials were in more urgent need of preservation than print materials. This may be a problem of not knowing where to start. In selecting materials for the digital archive, each library should each library establish digital archive selection priorities based on the unique institutional mandates and the research needs of its users. There is a strong case for preserving materials that may be redundant. In addition, academic law libraries should take responsibility for preserving digital content cited within their institutions’ law reviews to ensure that future researchers will able to reference source materials, and possibly the law reviews themselves.

The article looks at standards and systems. “Digital preservation represents an opportunity in the digital age for law libraries to reclaim their traditional roles as stewards of information, and to ensure that our digital legal heritage will be available to legal scholars and the public well into the future.”

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File Formats for Preservation. Malcolm Todd. DPC Technology Watch Report. December 2009.

Preserving intellectual content requires a firm grasp of the file formats used to create, store and disseminate it. Five main criteria for file format selection:

1. adoption: the extent to which use of a format is widespread
2. technological dependencies: whether a format depends on other technologies
3. disclosure: whether file format specifications are in the public domain
4. transparency: how readily a file can be identified and its contents checked
5. metadata support: whether metadata is provided within the format

These criteria should be used as a tool to create a clear preservation strategy appropriate to the repository. This must be done to manage the risk of obsolescence for the materials.

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Google Docs to allow storage of any type of file. Juan Carlos Perez. Computerworld. January 12, 2010.

Google is opening up its Docs hosted office suite so that users can store any type of file in it. It doesn’t mean that they can be worked on or edited online. File size limit has been increased to 250 MB. This is in addition to the G-drive online storage service The G-drive is alive! 1GB free, $.25/GB/year after that.

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Release of Web Curator Tool (WCT) version 1.5. Sourceforge. 2009.

The Web Curator Tool is an open-source workflow management application for archiving web sites. It is designed for use in libraries; it supports:

• Harvest Authorization: obtaining permission to harvest and make publicly accessible;
• Selection, scoping and scheduling: deciding what to harvest, how, and when;
• Description: adding basic Dublin Core metadata;
• Harvesting: downloading the selected material from the internet;
• Quality Review: ensuring the harvested material is of sufficient quality for archival purposes;
• Archiving: submitting the harvest results to a digital archive.

It was designed by the National Library of New Zealand, the British Library, and others. It is integrated with the Heritrix web crawler and supports job scheduling and the collection of descriptive metadata.

Scholarly Journals Introduce New Data Archiving Policy

Scholarly Journals Introduce New Data Archiving Policy

An important editorial about data archiving has just appeared online in the February issue of The American Naturalist.

To promote the preservation and fuller use of data, The American Naturalist, Evolution, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Ecology, Heredity, and other key journals in evolution and ecology will soon introduce a new data archiving policy to ensure that data supporting published articles is preserved and made publicly available. The policy has been enacted by the Executive Councils of the societies owning or sponsoring the journals.

For example, the policy of The American Naturalist will state:

This journal requires, as a condition for publication, that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad, or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allows, may opt to embargo access to the data for a period up to a year after publication. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor, especially for sensitive information such as human subject data or the location of endangered species.

This policy will be introduced approximately a year from now, after a period when authors are encouraged to voluntarily place their data in a public archive. Data that have an established standard repository, such as DNA sequences, should continue to be archived in the appropriate repository, such as GenBank. Data can also be archived in a more flexible, interdisciplinary digital data archive such as the National Science Foundation–sponsored Dryad repository, at http://datadryad.org/.

Dryad is developed by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the University of North Carolina Metadata Research Center, in collaboration with with a consortium of partner journals.

Authors of the editorial, Michael C. Whitlock, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, and Allen J. Moore present the case for the importance of data archiving in science. This is the first of several coordinated editorials soon to appear in major journals.

Digital Preservation Matters - January 2010

Insight into digital preservation of research output in Europe. Tom Kuipers, Jeffrey van der Hoeven. PARSE.Insight. January 14, 2010. [83p. PDF]

A report of surveys concerning digital preservation of digital research data and publications, data sharing, roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in research and funding of research. Some of the findings.

• The possibility of re-analysis of existing data is the most important driver for preserving research data.
• The most important threat to preserving digital information is the lack of sustainable hardware, software or support of computer environment that may make the information inaccessible.
• Legal issues and fear of data being misused are the greatest barriers to sharing data.
• Publishers believe the most important reason for preservation is that it will stimulate the advancement of science
• The majority of publishers fear that data will not be sustainable when the current owner ceases
• Most publishers do not have an arrangement in place to preserve underlying research data. They believe the author is responsible for this.

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Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Report and Recommendations . Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. January 12, 2010. [31p. PDF] Direct link to the report.

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and develop recommendations to expand public access to the journal articles that came from research funded by US government agencies. They developed a set of principles to use going forward:

1. Peer review is critical to maintain high quality and editorial integrity.
2. Adaptable business models are necessary.
3. Scholarly and scientific publications can and should be more broadly accessible with improved functionality to a wider audience
4. Sustained archiving and preservation are essential complements to reliable publishing methods.
5. Research results need to be published and maintained in ways that maximize the possibilities for creative reuse and interoperation among sites that host them.

They provide a number of recommendations and conclude: “We urge publishers, librarians, universities, and scholars to consider these recommendations as creating an appropriate collaborative environment and putting an end to the previous decade of wrangling over access issues. All can then focus efforts on interoperability, reuse, and preservation with the argument that those features of the whole system strongly support public access; on broad, intelligent use of the products of federally funded research; and on future advances in support of both scholarship and public access to its results.”

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Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Library of Congress. January 2010.

The newsletter contains information on:

• Memento: Time Travel for the Web. A project looking at adding a time-based dimension to searching and browsing.
• Voice of America and the expanding role of digital materials at the Library of Congress.

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40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 Moonwalk and the loss of data. Richard L. Hess. July 17, 2009.

• Vigilant migration of data as new storage techniques become available is the only way to assure long-term preservation.
• We MUST be selective as to what we keep in our archives because if we keep everything we won’t be able to afford it–or find it. This is one of the key jobs that archivists do. However, blindly following retention practices, as was done by NASA for the IRIG Apollo 11 tapes, needs to be tempered by historians as well.
• In a generation (or less) if we save everything, it will become an overwhelming burden and the high points will be lost if they are not properly indexed.

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How to Choose a Digital Preservation Strategy: Evaluating a Preservation Planning Procedure.

Stephan Strodl, et al. Vienna University of Technology. 2007.

There is a variety of tools to support preservation strategies such as migration or emulation, which are the most prominent. But different preservation requirements across institutions make it very difficult to decide which to implement. The PLANETS approach offers a standardized way of planning and evaluating preservation strategies. This describes the workflow for evaluating and selecting digital preservation solutions following these principles. Preservation Planning has become a crucial decision process. It involves evaluating preservation strategies and tools, and choosing what is most appropriate. This is the “most difficult part in digital preservation endeavours”. The workflow includes:

• Define the basis, the collection, types and numbers of records, legal issues, environment...
• Choose the records that represent the variety of the collection
• Identify the requirements, characteristics, costs, measurements, etc.
• Define and describe alternatives, different solutions, tools, etc
• Perform the experiment which includes multiple stages

Avoiding Amnesia in a Digital World

Press Release: Avoiding Amnesia in a Digital World

The world's archivists have been looking into a collective crystal ball, imagining the future of their profession in the 21st century. Meeting in Malta, 240 archives and records professionals from 90 countries recognised the enormous challenges they face in a fast changing world.

Documents and records previously on paper are turning digital. Archivists need to act swiftly to save these fragile electronic entities and make sure we don't all suffer a memory loss in future. They need to exploit new technologies to reach out to new generations of users. And to do this, archives staff need the right training, the right skills and the right experience.

"We're aiming to create a new generation of archivists, completely comfortable with Google and You Tube" commented conference chair Nolda Römer-Kenepa from Curaçao. Running through the meeting was the idea that today's archive leaders are digital immigrants, coming to terms with a new world of electronic communication, while a new generation of digital natives is now growing up.

Delegates to the conference on the theme "Imagining the 21st Century Archivist: New Strategies for Education and Training" agreed to work together through national and international networks, promoting internships and exchanges for archives staff, sharing online resources, setting up mentoring programmes and collaborating on research. Of particular concern to participants were problems of indigenous and minority peoples, calling for more flexible options for entering the profession. Distance learning using the internet was seen as a key way for developing countries to acquire education and training.

The International Council on Archives (ICA), which meets every year to exchange views and develop policies, was hosted this year by the National Archives of Malta. Welcoming delegates, National Archivist Charles Farrugia said: "Malta has a long archive tradition, with records going back 700 years. We face the 21st century with new confidence: we renewed our Archives Act in 2005 and started courses in archives and records management at the University of Malta the same year."

Today's archivist needs to manage change, to master technology and to operate in an electronic environment, while keeping a historical perspective. Beyond that, delegates recognised the need to understand business processes, to develop communication and advocacy skills and to be able to capture oral traditions.

Conference goers were concerned with the whole learning cycle, from initial education, through on the job training and taking in continuing professional development. They called for a constant review and update of education and training curricula, using feedback from educators, professional associations, employers and students.

Another key conclusion was the need for a strong relationship between research and teaching programmes in universities offering recordkeeping education. Archives organisations too, need to foster research and development projects, drawing in partners from the academic world, the voluntary sector and business.

Summing up the proceedings at a dinner in the historic surroundings of the La Valette Hall, ICA President Ian Wilson from Canada said: "Malta is a small country and it took courage and determination on the part of its National Archives to invite their worldwide colleagues here. Charles Farrugia's vision, the support of his Minister Dolores Cristina and the government have produced a most memorable conference in Malta."

ICA, the International Council on Archives, is based in Paris, and has nearly 1,500 individual and institutional members in 195 countries.
20 November 2009

Digital Preservation Matters - 30 October 2009

Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Peter B. Hirtle, et al. October 2009. [Book and 275p. PDF]

This book can help libraries learn how they can use the internet to provide access to their collections and comply with copyright laws. The book is also available in PDF form on the website. It “addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project.” A section on ‘Digital preservation and replacement copies’ is important to read to learn more about what we can do and can’t do.

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Universities offering new perks to broke students. Carol Warner. HigherEdMorning. October 25, 2009.

An initiative in Florida makes more than 120 textbooks available to students to download for free. It also sells the books at a discount because findings show:

• 22% of students are “uncomfortable” reading from a computer screen

• 75% of students prefer to read print copy,

• 60% of students would buy a discounted book even if the textbook was available for free online.

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Microsoft opens Outlook format, gives programs access to mail, calendar, contacts. John Fontana. HigherEdMorning. October 27, 2009.

Microsoft announced it will provide patent- and license-free use rights to the format behind its Outlook Personal Folders. It will document and publish the .pst format, which is used for the email, calendar, and contact functions. This will explain how to parse the contents of the file and how to access that data from other software applications.

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iTunes for college courses? It’s true. Carin Ford. HigherEdMorning. October 24, 2009.

The University of Virginia now offers over 1,000 lectures, videos, etc. as a free digital download from iTunes U. Others have done this for a long time. But they have combined other features. An interesting feature is that if a student subscribes to a specific course, new material will be downloaded automatically to his iTunes library.

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Obama Drupal-ing around; whitehouse.gov goes open source. Richi Jennings. Computerworld. October 26, 2009.

White House has chosen Drupal, an open-source content management software, to run the whitehouse.gov Web site.

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High Volume Document Storage Creates New Headaches for Content Managers. Steve Jones. CMS Wire. Oct 26, 2009.

Digital storage centers are filling rapidly. Some look at ‘single-instance storage’ as a viable option for organizations trying to reduce digital storage requirements. Single instancing is based on the principle of keeping one copy of a digital file that multiple users share and eliminating duplication.

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Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told. Jennifer Howard. The Chronicle of Higher Education. October 15, 2009.

A panel told ARL libraries that public access to research is "inevitable," but it will take work to get there. Faculty are starting to understand that open access to research has to happen in order to have the most scholarly opportunities. The US is far behind other countries regarding access to research. Researchers who don’t have the latest research can't fully participate in the academic discussions. The National Science Foundation plans to build an international, large-scale data-curation network.

Digital Preservation Matters - 23 October 2009

Sidekick Data Restoration Has Started, Microsoft Says. Barry Levine. NewsFactor. October 20, 2009.

Danger, a Microsoft subsidiary using ‘cloud computing’, experienced a system problem that erased all the users' contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists, and photos for those using the Sidekick smart-phone. Much of the data may be eventually recovered, but effective data backup and protection measures were not being followed. It shows the importance of using reliable vendors and have data backups. [This is the first major loss of ‘cloud – data’ that I know of.]

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Millennial disc guarantees data preservation. Logan Bradford. Daily Universe. September 15, 2009.

Barry Lunt, a BYU information technologies professor, will launch a product with the company, Millenniata, that produces a disc just like a CD or DVD that will last up to 1,000 years. He learned, through his seven years working for IBM in computer data, that data on CDs and DVDs would decay and be lost over just a few years because of optical discs’ ephemeral qualities, such as when they are exposed to sunlight and humidity. [We have been testing these discs and writers.]

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Wellcome Library to use JPEG2000 image format. Library blog. September 18, 2009

The Wellcome library in London has been using TIFF images as their archival storage format. But, anticipating adding over 30 million images, they wanted to find a way to efficiently store the digital content but still maintain high levels of quality and open standards required for long-term preservation. To do this they have chosen to use the JPEG2000 format in its digitization program. But the difficulty is that the JPEG2000 format has multiple versions. They wanted to know which version is best for long-term storage and access, so they commissioned a study by Kings College: JPEG 2000 as a Preservation and Access Format for the Wellcome Trust Digital Library. Robert Buckley, Simon Tanner.

Based on the study will adopt a "visually lossless" lossy compression to gain at least 75% storage savings in comparison to a TIFF version. “The recommended compression parameters will produce an image with no visible difference in image quality, but the compression is irreversible - i.e. the original bit stream will not be possible to reconstruct. As the Library will be digitising physical items that can (if necessary) be re-digitised, it was considered an acceptable compromise.” Some materials may be candidates for JPEG2000 lossless compression. They are also recommending that “JPEG 2000 be used with multiple resolution levels.”

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The Swedish Research Council requires free access to research results. Press release. October 8, 2009.

Researchers granted funds by the Research Council should publish their scientific research in publications that are available according to Open Access guidelines within a maximum period of six months. "We consider that publication of research which has been paid for out of public funds should be made freely accessible to all." The Open-Access rules apply so far only to scientifically assessed texts in journals and conference reports, and not to monographs and chapters of books.

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Sound archive of the British Library goes online, free of charge. Mark Brown. The Guardian News. 3 September 2009.

The British Library has made its archive of world and traditional music freely available on the internet. The Archival Sound Recordings archive contains about 28,000 recordings, estimated at 2,000 hours of sound. These recordings are from around the world and the oldest are from wax cylinders made in 1898. The Library wants to change the perception that “things are given to libraries and then are never seen again – we want these recordings to be accessible."

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Keeping Research Data Safe2: Data Survey added to project website. Neil Beagrie. Blog. 26 Sep 2009.

Information about the project and link to the website. The project is to identify long-lived datasets for the purpose of cost analysis will be ending soon. It refers to the previous project. In the activity model it mentions it will look at the development of an archive’s selection policy, also staff training and development. One area of concern was of OAIS terminology potentially being a barrier to understanding for some user groups.

Hardware updates

Micron boosts NAND flash endurance six-fold. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. October 19, 2009.

Often techniques are used to increase flash memory performance, but they also cut the capacity by 90%. Micron says its technique to increase density also increases the number of times data can be written to the device.

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Engineers create material that could hold 1TB of data on fingernail-sized chip. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. October 21, 2009.

Engineers have created a material that could hold a terabyte of data in a chip the size of a fingernail.

Digital Preservation Matters - 15 October 2009

PREMIS Implementation Fair 2009. Reports. October 7, 2009.

This fair concerning PREMIS (digital preservation metadata) was presented following the iPres conference in San Francisco. The online agenda for the PREMIS fair now includes the PowerPoint and PDF presentations. They include:

• Status of PREMIS (Brian Lavoie)
• Implementation in METS (Rebecca Guenther)
• PREMIS Rights implementation at University of California San Diego (Bradley Westbrook)
• PREMIS for geospatial data (Nancy Hoebelheinrich)
• Towards Interoperable Preservation Repositories (TIPR) project (Priscilla Caplan)

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New E-Book Company to Focus on Older Titles. Motoko Rich. The New York Times. October 13, 2009.

A new company has been formed that will republish old titles, and seeks new authors willing to be published in electronic format. They look at to an aggressive marketing campaign, and are looking at both the backlist and the electronic format.

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The ARL Preservation Statistics 2006-07. David Green. Association of Research Libraries. September 25, 2009.

The latest edition of the preservation statistics. It looks mainly at physical preservation, and includes information on personnel, expenditures, conservation treatment, preservation treatment, and preservation microfilming. The section dealing with digital preservation states:

“Digitizing for preservation purposes is the reproduction of bound volumes, pamphlets, unboundsheets, manuscripts, maps, posters, works of art on paper, and other paper-based materials for thepurpose of:

a) making duplicate copies that replace deteriorated originals (e.g., by digitizing texts and storing them permanently in electronic form and/or printing them on alkaline paper);

b) making preservation master copies to guard against irretrievable loss of unique originals (e.g., by making high-resolution electronic copies of photographs and storing them permanently and/or printing them; or

c) making surrogate copies that can be retrieved and distributed easily, thereby improving access to information resources without exposing original materials to excessive handling; or some combination of these factors.

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Alfresco Achieves DoD 5015.02 Records Management Certification. Marisa Peacock. CMS Wire. Oct 5, 2009.

Alfresco is certified as DoD 5015.2 compliant, the first open source content management system to do so. The Department of Defense standard outlines mandatory requirements for Records Management programs and is recognized as a base standard by many organizations.

netarchive Newsletter - August 2009

The two institutions behind the Netarchive.dk, the Royal Library and the State and University Library, have developed a system for web archiving called NetarchiveSuite, which has become open source.

An update on web archiving activity. The Act on Legal Deposit of Published Material of 22 December 2004 provides their legal foundation. The major issue for web archiving is access, which is currently limited to researchers. These come under their data protection act.

Their archive contains about 112 Terabytes with about 3.5 billion objects. The Top Level Domain DK now has more than 1.3 mill. domain names of which about 1 mill. are active. In addition they harvest about 44.000 Danish sites on other domains.

The system provides technical information on harvests but it is important to document the decisions made on what to collect and not collect so that future researchers may know the content of the archive.

Digital Preservation Matters - 9 October 2009

Preservation: Evolving Roles and Responsibilities of Research Libraries. ARL. September 15, 2009. Webcast, PDF.

This site has the webcast and a pdf of the original report. Some notes from the webcast:

There isn’t enough funding to meet all preservation needs

• Need to align preservation activities with institutional concerns.
• Can’t preserve without metadata. It is what connects preservation to the rest of the library.
• Must maintain the context and address rights issues.Research libraries must determine what researchers will need in the future, then preserve the content so that it can be us
• Need to balance print and digital collections
• Our special collections are what differentiate us from other research libraries, and we need to make broad access available to these collections

Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Describing Roles & Measuring Contemporary Preservation Activities in ARL Libraries. Lars Meyer. ARL. May 2009.

Notes: Preservation is a core function of the research library and a key element of the stewardship and access missions of research organizations. It is not just the responsibility of one department. Three perspectives for libraries:

1. Reallocate priorities and resources in response to changing trends in publishing, research, and teaching activities.
2. Expand practices related to preserving digital content though Web archiving, digital repositories, and efforts to preserve e-journals and other born digital content
3. Build collaborative activities to effectively address digital preservation challenges

“Digital Preservation is a subset of library preservation.” A definition of data curation: ““is the active and on-going management of data through its lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education. Data curation activities enable data discovery and retrieval, maintain its quality, add value, and provide for re-use over time. [It] includes authentication, archiving, management, preservation, retrieval, and representation.” Preservation includes managing the relationship between content, context, and access. Rather than discussing analog vs. digital, or access vs. preservation, it is more important to ask if relevant preservation work is being done throughout the life of digital content, and how or when is it done.

Preservation of born digital content begins with:

1. decisions about the form in which a library should acquire digital content;
2. a clear understanding of the library’s rights to preserve such content;
3. policies, technical infrastructure, and staff to realize the ongoing work;
4. possibly joining or develop cooperative digital preservation networks.

Digital Repositories: It is “vitally important for all research libraries to be engaging with digital repository development projects in some fashion.” These are not the same as preservation repositories; both are needed. One example given is the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS) is the institutional repository for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which has very well defined policies. Digitization, to be considered a preservation process, must include an institutional plan to preserve the digital content.

Web resources: many government documents which used to be printed are now available on online. Research libraries have a responsibility to determine how the community can best share the effort of identifying, describing, and preserving Web-based publications.

It is unlikely that all the needed preservation expertise will exist in one library so ARL members need to develop partnerships. Preservation is a continual learning process.

Some recommendations:

Institutions need well-developed policies, strategies, and practices.

1. Preservation decisions to be made strategically throughout the life-cycle of the resources
2. Community agreed-upon practices are needed for preserving digital surrogates.
3. Digital curation: an active set of activities that requires active partnerships
4. Digital preservation requires an understanding of rights, technical infrastructure, staffing
5. Repositories: include preservation activities, work with faculty on continuing access.

Google lets you custom-print millions of books. Ryan Singel. Wired. September 18, 2009.

Out of print books can be printed individually with the Espresso Book Machine through a venture with Google Book Search and On Demand Books. The $100,000 printer can print a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes; it then trims and binds the book. The materials cost about $3. The machine can print about 60,000 books a year. The books can be printed from pdf files. “Some 80 percent of the public-domain books are looked at in a given month.” “Neller said he'd love to see the day when Google Book Searchers can press a button next to a search result and find the closest local printer, but Google says that's a long way off.”

Digital Preservation Matters - 01 October 2009

Media Preservation Survey: A Report. Mike Casey. Indiana University Bloomington. 1 October 2009. [132 p. pdf]

An excellent and very detailed report from Indiana University Bloomington concerning the 560,000 audio and video recordings and reels of film on the campus. The report looks at the characteristics and condition of only one of the many groups of materials and the preservation challenges. This was a ten-month study by a team of archivists. The next step is developing a campus‐wide preservation plan. These historical "jewels" will be lost if not preserved soon. A few preservation activities exist on campus but they are too small to be effective or are not sustainable. They have 51 different media formats. They have over 180,000 digital files in the collection. "These formats require active preservation services from the moment of creation if their content is to survive."

Redundancy is a key strategy is saving the materials, but only 11% have a copy. "One copy is no copy." Preservation of audio and video objects require transferring to digital. Storing AV materials at the correct temperature and relative humidity is the "single most important factor in slowing the physical degradation of audiovisual media." At the current rate it will take 120 years to digitize the AV holdings. There is a very useful chart of Selected High and Medium Risk Formats in their collection.

Among their recommendations:

• Appoint a campus‐wide taskforce to advise on preservation
• Create a centralized media preservation and digitization center for the entire campus
• Develop special funding to digitization the materials quickly
• Create an appropriate and centralized physical storage space for the materials
• Provide archival appraisal and control across campus
• Develop cataloging services to accelerate research opportunities and improve access
• Completion of a digital preservation repository

Bagit: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation. Library of Congress. September 29, 2009.

Short video on YouTube about BagIt, a tool from The Library of Congress, California Digital Library and Stanford University. They have developed guidelines for creating, moving and verifying standardized digital containers, called "bags." BagIt requires a bag declaration, list of contents, and the actual content.

Archiving Is For E-discovery; Backup Is For Recovery. Mathew Lodge. The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel. September 01, 2009.

There are challenges with court requests for the discovery of information from backup tapes. If backup tapes are used for information retrieval then they are accessible for e-discovery. But they were never designed for this. Many are doing archiving, but that has different meanings to people. "Active archiving is different: it's a way of centrally managing the storage, retention and hold of information while ensuring "live" (or active) access to any item." It means to move objects to a central repository and provide access to users.

Purple Cows and Fringy Propositions. Carol Minton Morris. D-Lib Magazine. September/October 2009.

Notes from the Fringe Festival. "At every stage of the Bodleian Library's development, Oxford changed practices and policies, and improved – first analog and later digital – technologies in response to changes in the world beyond the Library. Realization is still a catalyst for change." The most useful metaphor for the repository is the internet. Institutions like Oxford create institutional repositories as components of larger library service platforms, not stand-alone silos. Clifford Lynch said we may be better with incremental, structured assessments rather than open-ended preservation commitments. We should aim at preserving digital objects "for the next 20 years with subsequent assessments instead of aiming to preserve them forever." Repositories should look at collecting works from scholars at the end of their careers and create a legacy. Repositories will move beyond educational organizations, so we should look at being involved in that.

Digital Preservation Matters - 09 September 2009

Harvard's Web Archive Collection Service (WAX). Website. September 2009.

This site began as a pilot project to address the management of web sites by collection managers for long-term archiving. It is designed to capture, manage, store and display web sites in an archive. “With blogs supplanting diaries, e-mail supplanting traditional correspondence, and HTML materials supplanting many forms of print collateral, collection managers have grown increasingly concerned about potential gaps in the documentation of our cultural heritage.” It is built using open source tools such as the Heritrix web crawler; the Wayback index and rendering tool; and the NutchWAX index and search tool. Documents concerning WAX are available at: http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/support/docs-wax.html

Glossary of Web Archiving Terms. Molly Bragg. Internet Archive website. August 06, 2009.

Part of the Archive-It help section. This page has a glossary of web archiving terms. The rest of the wiki has some good information about archiving web sites.

Missing links: the enduring web. Web Archiving Consortium Workshop. 21 July 2009.

Web pages are at risk. The early web pages are of similar historical importance with prehistoric writings, and both are at risk. “Key issues for long-term access and preservation remain unresolved.” This site includes the presentations from the workshop. Some of these include:

• Web Archive and Citation Repository in One: DACHS
• The future of researching the past of the Internet
• Web Archiving Tools: An Overview
• Context and content: Delivering Coordinated UK Web Archive to User Communities
• Capture and Continuity: Broken links and the UK Central Government Web Presence
• Diamonds in the Rough: Capturing and Preserving Online Content from Blogs
• Beyond Harvest: Long Term Preservation of the UK Web Archive
• From Web Page to Living Web Archive
• Emulating access to the web
• What we want with web-archives; will we win?

The following items are a few of the presentations at the Web Archiving Consortium Workshop:

Web Archive and Citation Repository in One: DACHS. Hanno Lecher.

Goals:

1. Capturing and archiving relevant resources as primary source for later research
2. Providing citation repository for authors and publishers

When citing online resources:

• Verify URL references
• Evaluate reliability of online resources
• Use PURLs
• Tools include: Snagit, Zotero, WebCite, DACHS Citation Repository

“the best current solution to improve access to Internet references is for publishers to require capture and submission of all Internet information at the time of manuscript consideration“

The future of researching the past of the Internet. Eric T. Meyer.

May not want to capture an entire web site, so you may consider the sub links. ‘Seed’ is a site from which other sites can be discovered through the links. Look at annotating the web sites; moving from snapshots of a site to more continuous data capture; how to share the results in a meaningful way.

Web Archiving Tools: An Overview. Helen Hockx-Yu.

1. Selection: have a policy, decide what to capture.
2. Collect data files (snapshot), examine for other sites to be collected, add to collection list
3. Store the archived files on disk, virus check, integrity check
4. Make accessible, index, add metadata, render the files, ensure long term access

Heretrix is the most commonly used tool, also Web Curator Tool.

WebARCive (WARC) format is coming into use. Other tools needed:

• Rendering, such as Open Source WaybackMachine;
• Full-text search, such as Nutch/Nutchwaxby or Hanzo tools
• Provide other search/retrieval options (subject, collection, site name, change over time)

No consensus on strategy, practices and specific tools. Crawlers work with HTML, but not advanced designs or tools. Need to handle problem sites. Decide what to duplicate.

Context and content: Delivering Coordinated UK Web Archive to User Communities. Cathy Smith.

The presentation starts with two questions:

1. What audiences should web archives anticipate and what does this mean for selection, ingest and preservation?
2. What will the web be like as an historical source, and what use will be made of archived web sites by future generations?

Recommendations:

1. Institutions continue to provide access to their individual collections, where appropriate, to support researchers; assure integrity of collections; allow integration with the institution’s other, non-web holdings;
2. Coordinate with other institutions by sharing collection development policies; defining the metadata standard, and developing technical interfaces.

Diamonds in the Rough: Capturing and Preserving Online Content from Blogs. Richard Davis.

“New genres of publications are becoming increasingly important to participants. For example, blogs are cited as a good window into what expert practitioners are doing. This material is not duplicated in traditional sources, yet it is important to consult”. Perceived barriers of web archiving are the cost of implementation and the complexity of available tools. Institutional blog archives are part of the institutional record. They should go through a selection process; support authenticity and fixity; be persistent and citable. Blogs seem to be an area where the content is of primary importance and design is secondary. Create an institutional or thematic archive by using a WordPress database to gather and store the posts and comments and provide access.

Chinese HD DVD Successor Outsells Blu-Ray Discs in China.

Chinese HD DVD Successor Outsells Blu-Ray Discs in China. Anton Shilov. X-bit labs. July 27, 2009.
A Chinese HD DVD standard (CBHD) is being used in China more than Blu-ray. Optical disc manufacturers, who produce Blu-ray, are not planning to support it. They see little support for this standard outside China.

Digital Preservation Matters - 02 September 2009

Archival Masters - An RUcore Case Study. Ron Jantz, Isaiah Beard. Duraspace Case Studies. September 2009.

This case study is a summary of practices that Rutgers University Libraries has used with their Fedora system in the treatment of archival masters which have been developed over a period of years. They are recognized as compromises between preservation theory and practice. This will be valuable for others dealing with similar problems. The case study looks at topics such as policies, critical technologies, persistent IDs, normalizing archival masters, using checksums, documenting architectures, generating presentation files, content models, file formats, and others. Video files have been their greatest challenge.

A Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians. Robert Lee Hotz. The Wall Street Journal. August 28, 2009.

The first curator of e-Manuscripts in the British Library struggles with archiving the flood of computer materials. “Never have so many people generated so much digital data or been able to lose so much of it so quickly.” More technical data has been collected in the past year than all previous years combined. “The problem is forcing historians to become scientists, and scientists to become archivists and curators.” People are overwhelmed with all the data. “What you keep and how you pay for it are difficult issues.”

Time to clean up your digital closet. Chris O'Brien. Mercury News. August 3, 2009.

What will happen to data you have stored on devices that become outdated? People don’t really think about it. There isn’t an easy solution, and may never be one due to the dynamic nature of computers. There are some strategies you can put in place. “You will need to start thinking like a librarian and become an active curator of your files. That means relentlessly organizing, labeling and tagging, backing up and deleting.” Keep only the essential data. Develop a system for organizing files online and offline and remember where they are. Label every file and tag them with as much information as you can. Make multiple copies. Investigate ways to keep track of all this and update it regularly.

Think Tank: Google must let us forget. James Harkin. The Sunday Times. August 9, 2009.

With all the data that is now being stored online, there needs to be a way to purge unwanted information. Some companies are gathering information about people from public sites and storing it in a single database. Some data about individuals may be posted by other people. Some say we are creating a “digital memory that vastly exceeds the capacity of our collective human mind”, that there needs to be a way of forgetting the unimportant elements. One way suggested is to put an expiry date on data, then to remove the information on that date.

This article will self-destruct: A tool to make online personal data vanish. Hannah Hickey. University of Washington website. July 21, 2009.

Computers have made it difficult for data to be left behind, but the University of Washington has developed a way to make data expire with a system called Vanish. Vanish, a free, open-source tool that works with Firefox, can place a time limit on text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser. “After a set time period, electronic communications such as e-mail, Facebook posts and chat messages would automatically self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all Web sites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. Not even the sender could retrieve them.” It is intended to make information as private as a “phone conversation”.

The Norwegian National Digital Library. Marianne Takle. Ariadne. July 2009.

The National Library of Norway is establishing itself as a digital national library. It plans to digitize its entire collection and has added other practices and strategies. Resources have been redistributed to give priority to digitization, documents are being deposited in digital format, and agreements are in place for digital deposits. It is making collections available to users over the Internet. The three Guiding Principles of Selection for the library are:

1. A strategy and priority for different collections: books: (oldest information); newspapers (those in demand); photos (donations); music (endangered sound formats).
2. The thematic selection of material across all media types
3. Follow up enquiries from other users and institutions and co-operate with them

The greatest obstacle to making information available is copyright.