Preserving Email DPC Technology Watch Report released.

Preserving Email DPC Technology Watch Report released. Neil Beagrie.  Blog. News release. 17 Feb 2012.  
The 57 page Preserving Email technology watch report gives practical advice on how to ensure that  email remains accessible.   "Users normally shoulder the ultimate responsibility for managing and preserving their own email.  This exposes important records to needless risks and is counterproductive in many cases." The three basic steps which institutions should undertake:

1. Define policies, including institutional commitment, specific actions to take, and end-user expectations, responsibilities and rights regarding the email archives
2. choosing appropriate tools to work with email in an environment where users have adequate storage space and without auto-deletion settings
3. implementing them in the light of local environmental factors and available resources.

 The report suggests five different preservation strategies with possible tools (such as Aid4Mail and Emailchemy) or methods (co-managing archive folders) in some of the cases, for the institution and individuals.

1. The ‘sweeping up crumbs’ or whole-account approach refers to harvesting email found on a user’s computer or account. 
2. The ‘nurturing and harvesting’ approach, helping email users ensure that critical records are retained in system-neutral formats, then using email migration software to capture and preserve records either as they are created or at the end of a user’s lifetime. An example is providing users a designated ‘archives’ box.
3. The ‘capturing carbon’ or whole system approach implements email archiving software to capture an entire email ecosystem or a portion of that ecosystem to an external email storage environment.
4. The ‘tagging and bagging’ or message-by-message approach, existing electronic record management systems, but which may not be effective.
5. The Personal Archives Service approach, which would offer services such as Carbonite or CrashPlan.

Unless we make the preservation of trusted email records a systematic part of our everyday operations, many important records will be lost. They cite some examples, such as the 22 million emails from the Executive Office of the President of the United States surrounding the Gulf War that we lost when servers were replaced. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Lessons From a (Former?) Digital Preservation Neophyte.

Lessons From a (Former?) Digital Preservation Neophyte. Chris Prom. Website. April 10, 2012.

What do we really need to do:

1. Render objects
2.  Retain evidence
3. Show authenticity

We do not need to understand it all at once, nor implement it all at the same time

1. Get your own house in order
2.  Begin helping others
3. Develop a digital program statement
4. Acquire and deal with digital born stuff
5.  Begin to implement a TDR

General Process:

• Understand your limitations
• Understand the format and structure of what you are trying to preserve
•  Match tools to desired services
• Be consistent
•  Be willing to experiment (and fail)
•  Provide something other people need

• The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory the other, the mastery of the practice. Erich Fromm
• Thought can only lead us to the knowledge but  it cannot give us the ultimate answer.  The only way in which the world can ultimately be grasped lies not in thought, but in the act.”

 

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Digital Preservation Network.

The Digital Preservation Network. George Eberhart. American Libraries Magazine. May 4, 2012.
The ARL membership meeting discussed the recently established Digital Preservation Network, a federation of universities intent on securing the long-term preservation of the digital scholarly record.  James Hilton said that only universities, not private industry, can solve the problem of preserving born-digital data and making it accessible to future generations. “Universities last for centuries. Companies do not.”
Other notes from the report:

• The problem is too large for just libraries to handle. The presidents of universities must be on board with this.
• The data and metadata of research and scholarship are susceptible to multiple single points of technical, political, and funding failure.
• The program asks for a $20,000 initial commitment to help fund project software.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Tools.

Digital Preservation Tools.  Paul Wheatley. SPRUCE Project Wiki. May 10, 2012.
Open Planets Foundation Digital Preservation Tool Registry. This lists many tools of all types that may be just what you are looking for, and also references to additional tool lists, such as http://agogified.com/tools-and-services.  A few of the categories include:

• Transcription Tools
• DataOne
• Forensic tools
• PDF Creation
• File Conversion tools
• Audio file conversion tools
• Web capture
• Email mining tools
• Record analysis tools
• Curation and data management tools
• Bulk extractor tools
• etc.

Digital Preservation Matters. 

Digital Preservation: Question and Response

Question: We are trying to move away from multiple physical copies of our archival audio.  Our goal is to just have redundant digital copies and one physical copy on some medium in case of catastrophic failure with the servers. What physical medium other audio archives are using for preservation/backup copies of digital audio files.

Response: It is important to have redundant digital copies in case of failure; we have had a number of occasions where we needed to recover objects from a second or third copy when other copies failed.  There are different ways to accomplish multiple digital copies, such as copies on server, tape (LTO), cloud (DuraCloud and others), and optical discs, or a mixture. There are advantages and disadvantages with each option; we have a mixture of these, but are moving towards two options, server copies with tape backup, and M-DISCs.  We have started using the Rosetta software to manage the server copies, which will have tape copies stored in a secure off site location.  But I want an additional copy on another medium, which is our M-DISC archive.

In general optical CDs and DVDs have a short lifespan.  For a number of years, I have been caring for a large disc archive of gold CDs and DVDs; there are multiple copies for redundancy. (There are tape copies also, which have had problems as well, but the gold archival discs have been considered the preservation copies.) Multiple copies are necessary since a percentage of the discs fail each year (the percentage depends on the collection).  In order to solve that problem, two professors on campus (Information Technology, and Chemistry & Material Science) created a digital storage medium that does not fail over time and is unaffected by any normal factors, such as light, heat, cold, oxidation, pollutants, material decay, bit flips, etc.  (Extreme stress tests by the US military could not get the discs to fail.)

The university licensed the technology to a company called Millenniata which has partnered with LG and others to produce the M-DISC.  Currently the M-DISC is a DVD format, which is somewhat of a drawback if you want to store large archives, but they are developing other densities and options. (There are some organizations using a multi-terabyte Millenniata device, but I have not seen it.) I have tested and used the M-DISCs for several years and have not had any problems.  (I plan to start another round of testing on my M-DISC archive this year to check on the status of the discs; I check them for usability, read error levels, and bit transfer integrity.) So I consider this my ‘copy in case of catastrophic failure’, while the Rosetta archive is my ‘active preservation archive’. There are others in the library and on campus (digital lab, records management, etc) that use the M-DISCs for their own long term copy for images, documents, audio, video, and such. Whatever you choose, you should think about multiple copies in multiple places on multiple media.  What you choose needs to fit your circumstances and be sustainable for your program. 

 Digital Preservation Matters.

Applying to NEH's Preservation Assistance Grants - Webinar.

Applying to NEH's Preservation Assistance Grants - Webinar. Elizabeth Joffrion. National Endowment for the Humanities.March 12, 2012.
An excellent webinar for the Connecting to Collections community on the NEH's Preservation Assistance Grant, what they are, how to apply for them, and examples of some projects that have been funded, including BYU's grant for a digital preservation workshop. Includes an introduction to the grants; who qualifies as a smaller institution; proposal development and grant writing strategies.They encourage institutions that have never applied before. The PAG grants are easy to write and there is no sharing cost.

 Digital Preservation Matters.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. May 2012. [PDF]
Items from the Newsletter include:

• Key outcomes of the NDIIPP program are to identify priorities for born digital collections and engage organizations committed to preserving digital content.
• Viewshare  is being used for the collections
• Floppy Disks are Dead, Long Live Floppy Disks
• Floppy disks are fragile constructions that were never designed for permanence.
• Difficult to determine what is on the floppy and to recover
• A floppy disk controller called Catweasel allows computers to access a wide variety of older disk formats (must have the floppy drive).
• Web archiving.  
• Because of the scope of the web sites, consider partnering with other institutions.
•  Preservation of and Access to Federally Funded Scientific Data
• Research data produced by federally funded scientific projects should be freely available to the wider research community and the public
• Public data should be a public resource, and data sharing supports core scientific values like openness, transparency, and replication. 
• Lack of resources for curating scientific data and a lingering tradition of data hoarding create resistance to open access to research data.

 Digital Preservation Matters.

Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio.

Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio. The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives. ed. by Kevin Bradley. Second edition 2009.
A web version of guidelines on creating and preserving digital audio objects.  Areas of interest covered include:

• Metadata, including preservation metadata
• Important to keep all aspects of preservation and transfer relating to audio files, including all technical parameters 
• Persistent Identifiers
• Naming conventions
• Digital preservation planning
• OAIS: the services and functions for monitoring the environment and providing recommendations to ensure that the information stored remains accessible to the Designated User Community over the long term, even if the original computing environment becomes obsolete
• Preservation planning is the process of knowing the technical issues in the repository, identifying the future preservation direction (pathways), and determining when a preservation action, such as format migration, will need to be made.
• Small scale digital archiving
• Digital preservation is as much an economic issue as a technical one.
• Any proposal to build and manage an archive of digital audio objects should have a strategy which includes plans for the funding of ongoing maintenance and replacement
• Risks
• The only way to know the condition of a digital collection is constant and comprehensive testing.
• A preservation strategy requires a listing of the risks associated with the loss of technical expertise and how that will be addressed.   
• An archive can distribute risk in a number of ways,  such as:
• form local partnerships so that content is distributed
• establish a relationship with a stable well funded archive; 
• engage a commercial supplier of storage services
• Recording formats
• It is not recommended that audio streams be recorded for long term storage.
• Recommend recording as a digital data file
• Recommend recording as .wav or preferably BWF .wav files 
• The large investment in a single format will also help support the continuance of that format for the longest period, as the industry will not change an entrenched format without significant benefits.
  
  Digital Preservation Matters.

New DuraCloud Digital Archiving and Preservation Services.

New DuraCloud Digital Archiving and Preservation Services. Press Release. Duraspace. May 1, 2012.
The DuraSpace organization announced new DuraCloud subscription plans that offer three levels digital preservation and archiving services in the cloud. Prices for the new subscription plans are competitive with commercial cloud providers and do not require additional transfer or variable costs.

1. DuraCloud Preservation Basic: for institutions that would like to have two redundant copies of their original content stored at one cloud data center. 
2. DuraCloud Preservation Plus: for institutions that wish to have four redundant copies of their original content stored at two cloud data centers. 
3. DuraCloud Enterprise: a full suite of configurable DuraCloud features for institutions that need multiple DuraCloud sub-accounts for departments, research groups, cross institutional projects, or individuals.

DuraCloud offers automated weekly content health checks, reporting, file repair  and more. It  runs on Amazon AWS, Rackspace and in the near future on the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Cloud, and provides customers with:
• Copies of the content stored with multiple providers
• Automated health checking of content
• Automated repair of damaged files for Preservation Plus customers
• A full suite of reports
• Online sharing and streaming to any internet-linked device

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound.

Preserving Moving Pictures and Sound. Richard Wright. DPC Technology Watch Report 12-01. March 2012. [PDF]
This excellent report is for anyone with responsibility for collections of sound or moving image content and an interest in preservation of that content. For audiovisual materials, digitization is critical to the survival of the content because of the obsolescence of playback equipment and decay and damage of physical items, whether analogue or digital.

The basic technology issue for audio/visual content is to digitize all items on the shelves, either for preservation or access. The risk of loss is high. Another issue is moving content from the current media to digital files. A third issue is preserving the digital files. This report describes the techniques for preservation planning, digitization and digital preservation of audiovisual content, and describes the technologies.  Preservation of these materials is difficult because they are physically, culturally, and economically different.
Explanation of signals and carriers. "Digital technology produces recordings that are independent of carriers. Carrier independence is liberation". Digital preservation of the digitized signal means to preserve the numbers, but also the technology to decode the numbers. ‘Maximum integrity’ means keeping the full quality of the audio and video. As far as possible, the new preservation copy should be an exact replica of the original: the content should not be modified in any way’. This may be difficult to achieve.

The two basic kinds of preservation action are: 1) changing the audiovisual content within a collection, or normalization; 2) changing the system that holds the collection.
There are four main factors in an analogue or digital conservation program:

1. packaging (wrappers), handling and storing;
2.  environmental conditions;
3.  protecting the masters; and
4.  condition monitoring, maintaining quality.

The four PrestoPRIME requirements for effective access to time-based media are:

1. granularity: division of the content into meaningful units;
2. navigation: the ability to select and use just one unit,
3. citation: the ability to cite a point on the time dimension of an audio or video file, with a permanent link
4. annotation: the ability of a user of content to make time-based contributions

Other topics include access rights, implications for small collections or institutions. The digitization standards, encoding, wrapper and metadata are all agreed and well documented.  There is no reason for the basic encoding to ever be changed, though wrappers may eventually become obsolete. All archives need to be aware of the risk of loss of embedded metadata. Finally, surveys have shown that in universities there is a major problem of material that is scattered, unidentified, undocumented and not under any form of preservation plan.

Digital Preservation Matters.

University of Utah Selects Ex Libris Rosetta for Long-Term Digital Preservation

University of Utah Selects Ex Libris Rosetta for Long-Term Digital Preservation. Press Release. April 30, 2012.
Ex Libris is pleased to announce that the University of Utah has opted for Ex Libris Rosetta to preserve the school's extensive cultural heritage collections, which include newspapers and other historical textual documents, photographs, rare books, oral history interviews (including transcripts and audio), motion picture collections, and more. In addition to cultural heritage collections, Rosetta will enable the University of Utah to preserve faculty publications and research data. The J. Willard Marriott Library hosts the collections of many campus departments and, as a member of the Mountain West Digital Library network, hosts collections belonging to other Utah institutions.

Digital Preservation Matters.

An Overview of Web Archiving.

An Overview of Web Archiving. Jinfang Niu. D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2012.
An article on the methods used at a variety of universities, and other institutions to select, acquire, describe and access web resources for their archives. Some notes from the article:

• Web archiving is the process of gathering up data that has been recorded on the World Wide Web, storing it, ensuring the data is preserved in an archive, and making the collected data available for future research.
• The workflow of web archiving includes appraisal and selection, acquisition, organization and storage, description and access. This workflow is the core of web archiving.
• Creating a web archive presents many challenges,  
• When archiving web content through web crawling programs, selection decisions are the basis for compiling a site list to crawl and configuring crawler parameters. Crawling may replace deposit for some things.
• In acquiring web resources, the decision of whether to seek permission from copyright owners depends on the legal environment of the web archive, the scale of the web archive, and the nature of archived content and the archiving organization.
•  Web archives need to preserve the authenticity and integrity of archived web content. The concept of provenance is important. 
• The library must decide how it will generate, store and use metadata. Also, how it will make this available to others.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Web Archives for Researchers: Representations, Expectations and Potential Uses.

Web Archives for Researchers: Representations, Expectations and Potential Uses. Peter Stirling, et al. D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2012.
Web archiving is one of the missions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. This study looks at content and selection policy, services and promotion, and the role of communities and cooperation.  While the interest of maintaining the "memory" of the web is obvious to the researchers, they are faced with the difficulty of defining, in what is a seemingly limitless space, meaningful collections of documents. Cultural heritage institutions such as national libraries are perceived as trusted third parties capable of creating rationally-constructed and well-documented collections, but such archives raise certain ethical and methodological questions.

To find source material on the web, some researchers look for non-traditional sources, such as blogs and social networks.  Researchers recognize the value of web archives, especially because websites disappear or change quickly.  The Internet is no longer just a place for publishing things, “but rather the traces left by actions that people could equally perform in the streets or in a shop: talking to people, walking, buying things... It can seem improper to some to archive anything relating to this kind of individual activity. On the other hand, one of the researchers acknowledges that archiving this material would provide a rich source for research in the future, and thus compares archiving it to archaeology.”  Some ask, "How do you archive the flow of time?" New models may be needed. And when selecting an archive, the selection criteria should also be archived, as they may change over time.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The secrets of Digitalkoot: Lessons learned crowdsourcing data entry to 50,000 people (for free).

The secrets of Digitalkoot: Lessons learned crowdsourcing data entry to 50,000 people (for free). Tommaso De Benetti.  Microtask. June 16, 2011.
National Library of Finland launched a project called Digitalkoot, which was a test of crowdsourcing with 50,000 volunteers.  The aim was to digitize the National Library’s archives and make them searchable over the internet. The volunteers input data that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software struggles with (for example documents that are handwritten or printed in old fonts). Digitalkoot relies on machines, humans and a gaming twist.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Dream of perpetual access comes true!

Dream of perpetual access comes true! Jeffrey van der Hoeven. Open Planets Foundation.  29 March 2012.
The KEEP project released its final version of the open source Emulation Framework software. This project has brought emulation in the digital preservation context to the next level, that is, user friendly.  The easy to install package runs on all major computer platforms.  It automates several steps:

1. identify what kind of digital file you want to render;
2. find the required software and computer platform you need;
3. match the requirements with available software and emulators;
4. install the emulator;
5. configure the emulator and prepare software environment;
6. inject the digital file you selected into the emulated environment;
7. give you control over the emulated environment.

 The software supports six different computer platforms out of the box: x86, Commodore 64, Amiga, BBC Micro, Amstrad, Thomson, by using seven open source emulators which are distributed  with the Emulation Framework. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

With tech breakthrough, Seagate promises 60TB drives this decade

With tech breakthrough, Seagate promises 60TB drives this decade.  Lucas Mearian. Computerworld.  March 20, 2012.

 Seagate said they have achieved a density of 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) per square inch on a disk drive platter. The technology would lead to the production this decade of 3.5-in. hard drives with up to 60TB of capacity.

As drive manufacturers store more bits per square inch on the surface of a disk, they also tighten the data tracks. The challenge as those tracks tighten is overcoming magnetic disruption between the bits of data, which causes bits to flip their magnetic poles resulting in data errors.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Brigham Young University Selects Ex Libris Rosetta

Brigham Young University Selects Ex Libris Rosetta. Press Release. February 14, 2012.
Ex Libris has announced that Brigham Young University (BYU) has selected the Ex Libris Rosetta digital preservation system. The first member of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) to adopt Rosetta, Brigham Young will implement Rosetta initially for the Harold B. Lee Library’s digital collections and will later expand the implementation to the digital assets of the university’s colleges and schools.

Rosetta encompasses the entire digital preservation workflow, including the acquisition, validation, ingest, storage, preservation, and delivery of digital objects. Rosetta enables academic institutions as well as libraries, archives, and other memory institutions to manage, preserve, and provide access to institutional documents, research output in digital formats, digital images, Web sites, and other digitally born and digitized materials.

Digital Preservation Matters. 

Why don't we already have an Integrated Framework for the Publication and Preservation of all Data Products?

Why don't we already have an Integrated Framework for the Publication and Preservation of all Data Products?   Alberto Accomazzi,et al. Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems.  
7 Dec 2011.
Astronomy has long had a working network of archives supporting the curation of publications and data. There are examples of websites giving access to data sets, but they are sometimes short lived.  "We can only realistically take implicit promises of long-term data archival as what they are: well-intentioned plans which are contingent on a number of factors, some of which are out of our control." We should take steps to ensure that our system of archiving, sharing and linking resources is as resilient as it can be.  Some ideas are: 

1. future-proof the naming system: assign persistent data IDs to items we want to preserve 
2. provide the ability to cite complete datasets, just as we can cite websites
3. include a data reference section in academic papers

Curated datasets need to be preserved indefinitely for scholarly purposes.

Digital Preservation Matters.

A literature review: What exactly should we preserve? How scholars address this question and where is the gap

A literature review: What exactly should we preserve? How scholars address this question and where is the gap.  Jyue Tyan Low. Cornell University Library. 7 Dec 2011.
There are generally two approaches to long-term preservation of digital materials

1. preserving the object in its original form as much as possible along with the accompanying systems,
2. migration or transformation: transforming the object to make it compatible with more current systems but retaining the original “look and feel.

Migration is the most widely used method, but there can be changes to the original.  If some of the original properties are lost, what then are the essential properties to maintaining its integrity?  Currently there are no formal and objective way to help stakeholders decide what the significant properties of the objects are, which are defined as:

The characteristics of digital objects that must be preserved over time in
order to ensure the continued accessibility, usability, and meaning of the
objects, and their capacity to be accepted as evidence of what they purport
to record.

An important goal of digital preservation is more than just retrieving the objects, it is to ensure the authenticity of the information.  A digital object can change as long as the final output is what it is expected to be.  The properties to preserve come from the purpose of the object, and at least one purpose for the object needs to be defined. Archivists have created standards that look at records in the context of their creation, intended use and preservation.  It is important to ask what features of the object is important when delivering to the user.  There may be many uses to many communities that were not intended by the object creator, so we should not let the ideal limit the reasonable.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Geospatial Data Preservation.

Geospatial Data Preservation. Website. November 2011.
The Geospatial Resource Center is being developed as a finding tool for freely available web-based resources about the preservation of geospatial information. A variety of selected resources are being added, including reports, presentations, standards, and information about tools for preparing geospatial assets for long-term access and use. The resources are indexed to enable searching of titles and are categorized to facilitate discovery by choosing among topics, resource types, or both. The website contains many valuable resources.  A few resources from these three categories:

Education & Training

• Appraisal and selection of geospatial data for preservation
• Best Practices for Geospatial Programs
• Copyright Quickguide

Tools & Software

• Cost Estimation Toolkit
• Conversion tools for geospatial data
• Geospatial metadata tools

Policies & Benefits

• Collection policies,
• Content standards,
• Policies on Open geospatial data access and preservation