Will Kindles kill libraries?

Will Kindles kill libraries? Eugenia Williamson. The Phoenix. July 27, 2011.
[There are many sources discussing this major change for publishing and libraries.  This post really looks at the preservation aspect.]

"Preserving materials for future generations is a big part of why libraries exist in the first place. According to the American Library Association, preservation upholds the First Amendment by contributing to the free flow of information."

But a library can't preserve a book it doesn't own, and many digital works are now being licensed rather than purchased. One company, OverDrive, is a middleman negotiating between the libraries and publishers.  It is unknown if there are long term rights for these materials, and if so, what the rights are, and how this fits into a preservation model.

As reported in Library Journal, that state's library system began using those services in 2006, and last year, that company proposed a new contract that would raise administrative fees 700 percent by 2015.

Kansas has announced their intent to petition for the right to terminate its contract which Kansas believes that it owns the e-books it licensed and has the right to transfer them to a new service provider. If the library cannot do this, they will have spent $568,000 for books it can no longer access, which is more than if they had purchased print copies that they would own.

New Statistics Model for Book Industry Shows Trade Ebook Sales Grew Over 1,000 Percent

New Statistics Model for Book Industry Shows Trade Ebook Sales Grew Over 1,000 Percent. Library Journal. Michael Kelley. August 9, 2011.
A new annual survey of the total U.S. book publishing industry shows growing revenue and exponential eBook sales.

The industry sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase over 2008.  Publishers' net sales revenue grew to $27.94 billion in 2010, a 5.6 percent increase over 2008. Net revenue from trade books grew 5.8 percent since 2008, to $13.94 billion.

Within the trade segment, eBooks, again excluding the robust growth that has occurred in 2011, grew from 0.6 percent of the total trade market share in 2008 to 6.4 percent in 2010, which translates to a 1,274.1 percent increase in publisher net sales revenue year-over-year, with total net revenue for 2010 at $878 million. In the same three years, 114 million ebooks were sold, a 1,039.6 percent increase. In adult fiction, ebooks represent 13.6 percent of the net revenue market share.

Online sales became an increasingly important distribution channel. Net sales revenue for content distributed online was $2.82 billion in 2010, a three-year overall growth of 55.2 percent. Net unit sales by publishers to online channels grew 68.6 percent, to 276 million in 2010.

For 2010, overall bricks-and-mortar trade retail remained the largest distribution channel in the United States (40.8 percent). In contrast to the eBook numbers, total net sales revenue of trade hardcovers in 2010 was $5.26 billion, an increase of only 0.9 percent over the three years, and its share of the market declined from 39.6 percent in 2008 to 37.7 percent in 2010. Softcover revenue was up 1.2 percent to $5.27 billion, with a similar decline in market share, and mass-market paperback net sales revenue was down 13.8 percent to $1.28 billion.

Washington State Archives - Digital Archives

The archives is dedicated specifically to the preservation of electronic records from both State and Local agencies that have permanent legal, fiscal or historical value. This is a Microsoft solution. The web interface and database storehouse were custom designed specifically for the Digital Archives.  The documents on their website about the  project (in PDF or PowerPoint formats) are worth reviewing.  They are :

• Digital Archives Feasibility Study 
• Digital Archives Investment Plan 
• ISB Presentation Sept 2004 
• Digital Archives Overview 
• Quality Assurance Report Q1 
• Quality Assurance Report Q3

Building a Sustainable Institutional Repository

Building a Sustainable Institutional Repository. Chenying Li, et al. D-Lib Magazine. July/August 2011.
Institutional Repositories are an increasingly important resource and service offered by libraries. Increasing the use of the content is a key to building a sustainable IR. Two organizational types:

1. Structured Content Organization
Organizing content according to its role in the University, which provides a more orderly process of content organization and more efficient metadata.

2. Modular Content Publishing
Creating modules as independent publishing units that work together as a complete and comprehensive publishing system. This uses themed publishing and metadata aggregation.

It is becoming more important for libraries to provide users with the contents and services that are found in institutional repositories.  

Free Tools for Your Preservation Toolbelt.

Free Tools for Your Preservation Toolbelt. Randy Stern, Spencer McEwen.  Harvard.  June 2011. A presentation delivered at the Open Repositories 2011 conference. 
The Digital Repository Service models “objects” rather than files.  Examples:
- Delivery, archival master, and production master images comprise one object
- All images and OCR text for a book comprise one object

Object Preservation Metadata: Digital preservation requires accurate and sufficient technical metadata to support preservation planning and activities. Descriptive metadata is also valuable for identification and management by curators.  Standards-based schema maximize tool support and ability to exchange data with other repositories.

Here are some tools they use, which are open source or will be soon.

Tool 1 - FITS (File Information Tool Set)
Identifies, validates, and extracts technical metadata from files

Tool 2 - OTS-Schemas (Object Tool Set Schemas)
Java library for reading and writing documents in common XML schemas

Tool 3 - OTS (Object Tool Set)
Java library for creating, reading, updating, and writing METS Object Descriptors

Tool 4 - BatchBuilder
Builds OTS METS objects (and SIP) from directory hierarchies of content files

Five Tips for Designing Preservable Websites.

Five Tips for Designing Preservable Websites. Robin C. Davis.  The Bigger Picture.  Smithsonian Institution Archives. August 2, 2011.
Smithsonian Institution Archives is preserving the Institution’s history, including its large web presence. The Archives crawls each website using Heritrix, an open-source tool created by the Internet Archive, to capture content in an archival format. The purpose is to preserve the appearance, behavior, and content of digital objects. The Archives tailors crawl configurations to each specific website to capture as much of it as possible while adhering to the collections policy. Sometimes the structure of the site itself makes a perfect crawl difficult or impossible.

Five suggestions for web developers that can help ensure that their websites will be easier to crawl, to make accessible, and to preserve.

1. Follow accessibility standards
2. Avoid proprietary formats for important content or provide alternate versions
3. Maintain stable URLs and redirect when necessary.  Avoid linkrot, meaning links which point to resources that are no longer available. Carefully plan and implement a URL design scheme with a policy of persistence. They have found websites with as many as 40% broken links.
4. Design navigation carefully and include a sitemap. The crawler is usually set to capture only six levels deep. To help others discover your entire website, provide a sitemap and “view all” link for documents.
5. Allow browsing of collections, not just searching, such as by arranging images by genre.

Designing a web site with preservation in mind can help safeguard it for the future. This is part of our cultural legacy.

Hawaiian Heritage sites set to launch on CyArk website.

Hawaiian Heritage sites set to launch on CyArk website. Press release. Hawaii 24/7. August 10, 2011.   
CyArk, with the help of its partners, conducted the field work for the Digital Preservation of three culturally significant Hawaiian sites, which include site animations, photography, panoramas, perspectives, and drawings. This information will showcase oft-overlooked heritage sites and highlight the need for cultural resource preservation.

CyArk is a non profit organization with the mission of digitally preserving cultural heritage sites through collecting, archiving and providing open access to data created by laser scanning, digital modeling, and other state-of-the-art technologies.

Start-up to release 'stone-like' optical disc that lasts forever

Start-up to release 'stone-like' optical disc that lasts forever.  Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. August 8, 2011.

Millenniata has partnered with Hitachi-LG Data Storage to launch an M-Disc read-write player in early October.  Any DVD player maker will be able to produce M-Disc machines by simply upgrading their product's firmware. Millenniata said it has also proven it can produce Blu-ray format discs with its technology - a product it plans to release in future iterations. Currently the discs write at  only 4x speed, but they are working to increase it.

Millenniata partnered with Hitachi-LG Data Storage to provide M-Ready technology in most of its DVD and Blu-ray drives. The technology is addressing the needs of the long-term data archive market.  This disc does not need special temperature or humidity controls.

Economics and Digital Preservation: Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

Economics and Digital Preservation: Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.  Fran Berman and Brian Lavoie. Library of Congress. July 21, 2011. PDF. [Old link has disappeared. To read, use the 2015 link]
Digital Preservation is both a technical and economic problem. There must be solutions to both for there to be success.  Even the most elegant technical solution is no solution at all if it is not economically sustainable.  Some of the challenges they list:

• “One‐time” funding models are inadequate to address persistent long‐term access and preservation needs
• Poor alignment between stakeholders in the digital preservation and access world and their roles, responsibilities and support models
• Lack of institutional, enterprise, and/or community incentives to support the collaboration needed to enforce sustainable economic models
• Complacency that current practices are “good enough” and / or the problem is not urgent.
• Fear that digital access and preservation is too big to take on

Stakeholders are:

• Those who benefit from use of a preserved asset
• Those who select what to preserve
• Those who own or have rights to an asset
• Those who preserve the asset
• Those who pay

There is no magic bullet, and there is no "free" solution.

Recommendations:

1.        Create Sustainability‐friendly policies and mandates

2.        Invest in preservation infrastructure

3.        Create preservation‐aware communities

a.        Create public public‐private partnerships to align distinct stakeholder groups

b.        Convene expert communities to address the selection and preservation needs of valuable materials for which there is no stewardship

4.        Raise awareness

a.        Provide leadership in training and education For 21st century digital preservation,

b.        Promote digital preservation skills and awareness

5.        Take individual responsibility

a.        Provide nonexclusive rights to preserve and distribute created content

b.        Partner with preservation experts throughout the data lifecycle to ensure your data will be maintained in a form that will be useful over the long term

c.        Pro‐actively participate in professional organizations to create best practices and selection priorities.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Library of Congress.  August 2011. [PDF]

The newsletter includes information on:

•  “Make it Work: Improvisations on the Stewardship of Digital Information,” 
• All About Archiving the Web 
• Possible uniform law on the authentication of online legal materials
• Exploring Cultural Heritage Collections With Recollection
• Recollection is a free and open source platform that lets archivists, librarians, scholars and curators create easy to navigate web interfaces (like maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) to their digital, cultural heritage collections.
• Finding digital preservation training.  The training calendar.
• Digital Time Capsules and our "Digital Afterlife"
• Creating and organizing personal digital content for future access.
• The Signal: Library of Congress blog to discuss digital stewardship in a way that is informative and appealing.
• Tending the machines
• What skills does a digital archivist or librarian need?  Skills students need to compete in the archives and libraries job market.  Expertise with programming, formats and standards is, of course, very important.  But other talents have a greater bearing on success in today’s workplace. Such as:
• an ability to understand and adapt to new ways of using technology
• eagerness to help refine how things are done
• a basic understanding of how the different system parts contribute to doing the job at hand
• ability to bridge two distinct social camps: the highly technical and the highly not-technical
• how choose among these tools and software options to meet the needs of users
• communication skills, including presentation, writing, speaking and persuading
• ability to social media and to integrate photographs, graphics and video with text to get the right message out to as many people as possible

GE pushes ahead with 500GB holographic disc storage

GE pushes ahead with 500GB holographic disc storage. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. July 28, 2011.
GE hopes to license its technology for a 500GB holographic disc.  This was first announced in 2009. They hope to create a 1 TB disc.  InPhase Technologies is also working on a 300GB holographic optical disk.
[These are still a long way from implementation, if they ever do succeed.]

Digital Preservation Courses & Workshops For Organizations and Institutions

Digital Preservation Courses & Workshops For Organizations and Institutions. Library of Congress. August 2011.  The Library of Congress, as part of their outreach and education efforts, provide this calendar to help people access training related to digital preservation. The calendar can be sorted by date, course, format, location, and cost. To find out more about an offering, click on its title. The list includes a number that are free and online, which include:

• Preserving Your Personal Digital Memories
• Protecting Future Access Now: Models for Preserving Digitized Books and Other Content at Cultural Heritage Organizations
• An Introduction to Digital Preservation

Digital Preservation in a Box: NDSA Outreach

Digital Preservation in a Box: NDSA Outreach. Butch Lazorchak. The Signal. August 3rd, 2011.
A group has been working on what it calls “Digital Preservation in a Box.” This is an introduction to the concepts of preserving digital information through a suite of resources that are available to anyone planning an outreach event, presentation, or preparing to teach introductory digital preservation concepts.There are a few resources listed and it will develop over time.

Poll: How do you back up your data?

Poll: How do you back up your data?   Geoff Gasior. The Tech Report.  February 16, 2011.
The more digital content we accumulate, the more we have to lose in the event of storage failure.  There are options. One poll showed how some people personally back up their data:

• USB thumb drive: 4%
• External hard drive: 35%
• Optical disc: 4%
• Memory card: 0.3% 
• Tape: 1%
• Network-attached storage device: 15%
• Online backup service: 4%
• Multiple methods: 19%
• Gonna lose everything if my hard drive dies: 20%

Digital Preservation Outreach and Education

The Library of Congress has created the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) initiative to encourage individuals and organizations to preserve their digital materials.  This site contains a calendar of courses and workshops, many free and online.  There is a wealth of information here.

They have outlined a number of activities (needs assessment, core principles, education needs, etc.)  and have create six DPOE regions :

• Midwest: OH, IN, MI, IL, WI, MO, IA, MN, ND, SD, NE, KS
• Northeast: ME, VT, NH, RI, MA, CT, NY, NJ, PA
• Northwest: WA, OR, MT, WY, ID, AK
• Southeast: MS, AL, GA, FL, SC, NC, TN, KY, WV, VA, DC, MD, DE
• Southcentral: TX, OK, AR, LA
• Southwest: CA, NV, UT, CO, AZ, HI

Puzzling over digital preservation – Identifying traditional and new skills needed for digital preservation

Puzzling over digital preservation – Identifying traditional and new skills needed for digital preservation.  Thomas Bähr, et al.  IFLA Conference paper, submitted: June 1, 2011. 

This is an excellent paper. The topic is important for all libraries:  “Preservation is a core competency of librarians, however, gaps still exist when it comes to being able to accept that role fully in the digital realm.” The topic is complex: "Digital preservation is not a single task but encompasses all strategies and measures taken to recover and maintain access to digital information." Maintaining digital cultural heritage requires new skills for content experts and technology experts.  In 2010 a Digital Preservation Outreach and Education survey of 481 libraries showed:

• 27% of surveyed libraries had digital preservation staff;
• 21% relied on a vendor
• 14% stated that no one was responsible for digital preservation at their institution. 
• 38% said various staff was assigned to digital preservation tasks as needed.

 The paper looks at the digital preservation skill needs and identifies gaps that exist.

• The first step to digital preservation is to know what your holdings are.  Make a meaningful grouping of items to a collection level. 
• Survey the collection for preservation needs.  Define approaches for surveying offline and online materials. Give attention to capturing carrier type details.  The survey of offline data should include a readability test and a rough overview of the formats.  
• Know how to handle your digital materials for proper storage and proper processing, such as optical or magnetic media. You need to understand how the media works to do this. Good metadata, technical, bibliographic, etc. is required for proper handling and preservation of data, which increases the skill level needed.  
• Sustainability of access requires an awareness of what the future is bringing.  Content knowledge in the digital age is more than knowing the intellectual information of an item; it includes the knowledge of presentation and usability of a digital object, as well as the user’s expectations.
• Preservation strategies and action are always based on risk assessment and planning. These require a profound knowledge of library and technology processes as well as digital preservation practices.
•  Institutions with a stewardship for digital cultural heritage need “appropriate staff to support activities related to the long-term preservation of the data,” and the digital preservation specialist must be committed to “lifelong learning”.
• “As digital preservation is a global problem, active involvement in the national and international community is of immense importance.”

UK National Archives Digital Preservation Policy

The UK National Archives has published a document for archives on the need for a digital preservation policy. The guide explains the key characteristics of a digital preservation policy, why there is a need for a policy, how it supports digital preservation, what the criteria are and how it relates to other documentation and policies.  It contains links to digital preservation policies of other institutions, as well as links to other sites that would help someone create a digital preservation policy.

• Active preservation is any proactive action taken in the preservation of digital records (e.g. migration of records). 
• Passive preservation is any action that supports digital preservation but does not engage with the digital records directly (e.g. management and backing up of servers storing digital records).

  Archives may need to revert to an earlier version of a digital record(s) if a chosen migration path is unsuccessful. To do this a previous instance of a record will need to be retained.
The document also outlines criteria and measures for a successful digital preservation policy.
 Digital preservation policies: guidance for archives (PDF).

CERN pushes storage limits as it probes secrets of universe

Loek Essers. Computerworld.  July 11, 2011.
Sensors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN generate around 1 petabyte of data per second.  It is not possible to store that amount of data, nor is all of the data needed.  They select the 'must-have' data: "The goal is to try not to drop anything interesting." After filtering, CERN has up to 25 petabytes of data to store each year, most of which is stored on tapes.  They have a capacity of about 34 PB on tape and 45 PB on disk.  Analyzing the data is done by their computer grid.

The death of backup and the rapid rise of the cloud

Data backups have always been expensive, complicated, and prone to errors.  As data has increased, backups have been difficult to complete in the time available.  Increasingly, organizations are outsourcing their backups and data recovery services to cloud vendors. 

This may be a great benefit for system administrators, but it doesn't eliminate the need to understand your archiving requirements, data security and protection issues, and a plan for vendor migration.

University Offers Help to Researchers Wrestling with Digital Data Management

Data management is becoming more complicated with larger data sets. More disciplines are becoming data intensive. Some projects can generate up to a petabyte a day. Managing, analyzing and preserving large data sets is a modern data management problem that all research institutions now face to some degree. "Research data haphazardly saved on a hard drive – or worse, a disk stored in a desk drawer – might be recoverable now, but there's no guarantee it will be decades down the line."

Data has a lifecycle to it.  "You begin and collect data, and then you have to go in and process it and manage it, and then you analyze and publish results, and then ideally you archive it. That's as true for digital data as it is for other forms." National foundations have adopted data management requirements, though those requirements are somewhat open-ended and still evolving.

The Scientific Data Consulting Group also is involved in the creation of DMPTool, a new online tool that helps institutions create their own data management plans. "Even if we didn't have compliance requirements set by the federal government, the right thing to do would be to assist faculty members and graduate students with dealing with these data they are collecting,"