Thursday, December 18, 2014

In an All-Digital Future, It’s the New Movies That Will Be in Trouble.

In an All-Digital Future, It’s the New Movies That Will Be in Trouble. Bilge Ebiri. New York Media. December 16, 2014.
In 2007, researchers forecast that around 50 percent of the world’s movie screens would be digital by 2013. By the end of 2013, the figure was closer to 90 percent. In a short time, film has gone from an industry standard to a novelty.
Digital seemed by far the best option, but for long term preservation it has turned into "something of a catastrophe". “At this time, the longevity of digital files of moving images is anybody’s guess. We do know that it is much, much shorter than the longevity of photochemical film. If hard drives aren’t occasionally turned on, he notes, they start to become unusable."

Two famous examples of the perils of digital preservation:
  1. when the makers of Toy Story attempted to put their film out on DVD a few years after its release, they discovered that much of the original digital files of the film had been corrupted. 
  2. A similar fate came close to befalling Toy Story 2 when someone accidentally hit a “delete” button.
The irony of the digital revolution: It’s the newer movies that are in trouble. For content that was born in digital form, "all we can do is migrate the digital files as often as possible.” That requires technology and resources that go beyond what most organizations are able to handle.

The physical deterioration of drives and discs and chips isn’t the only thing digital filmmakers need to worry about. Digital files are also prone to become outdated, with software upgrades and new programs that render previous ones obsolete or unusable. Formats may be changing every 18 months to two years and may not be compatible with each other.

Part of the problem is that preservation isn’t a for-profit endeavor endeavor, so many do not want to spend a lot of money and space to preserve resources. But it becomes more important when considering the long term view.  “There’s this notion, which is not true, that digital is very inexpensive. Filmmakers and studios are saving a lot of money in production and post-production costs because of digital, and that’s a good thing. But because of that, many people don’t really understand that they’re putting their assets at risk by wholesale transferring to digital and then not keeping the originals.”

“This is not a new problem. In the 1970s and '80s, some film companies took all of their motion-picture film and transferred it to ¾-inch video, which was thought of as a preservation medium. They threw away their originals! And ¾-inch video was not a good format. In fact, it was a terrible format! This is happening with digital now. They’ve already sloughed off their nitrate collections, and there are actually discussions in some of the studios to get rid of their 35mm collections as well.”

However, film may not be as dead as some seem to think. Some archives have discussed manufacturing film themselves, if and when companies like Kodak or Agfa or Fuji go out of business. Sooner or later, there will be other strategies for the long-term preservation of digital material. “I even saw someone discussing the idea of shooting it all up into space and then waiting for it to come back around again,” he says. “That sounded like pure science-fiction, but who knows?”

Large studios are making sure that all the digital files associated with a multi-billion-dollar movie will be duplicated many times and securely placed in multiple locations. Others may not have the resources to preserve the content. Some relevant questions to ask:
  •  What will happen to them over the course of what is sure to be multiple format changes? 
  • Is somebody making sure their hard drives and the files are still usable? 
  • Have they been distributed into multiple locations? 
  • Will their producers and distributors remain solvent enough over the years to care for the content?
The story of cinema is the story of discovery. Movies once considered afterthoughts can, over time, become beloved classics. A print of a film long forgotten might turn up in a foreign archive and get revived. That may not be possible in an all-digital future, where moving-image files will need regular maintenance and upgrades to keep them viable. A forgotten movie, in other words, will be an extinct movie. 

Celluloid is far from a perfect medium, but it can survive even if some frames or reels are damaged or missing.  Not unlike with books, the simplicity of the physical medium held the key to its longevity.


Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Aligning Customer Needs: Business Process Management (BPM) and Successful Change Management in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections

Aligning Customer Needs: Business Process Management (BPM) and Successful Change Management in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. Joseph Gordon Daines III. Library Leadership & Management. November 2014. PDF
A lot of archival processing happens before an archival or manuscript collection can be made available for research use by patrons. It is central to the archival endeavor. This article looks at the role of business process management (BPM) in automating many of the workflows used to manage the manuscript and archival collections

BPM is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the needs and wants of their customer bases. The Special Collections department identified its customer bases as its curatorial staff and its patrons. Enabling the curatorial staff to more efficiently prepare manuscript collections for research use would also enable better customer service. Several different BPM techniques were used to gain an understanding of the curatorial needs of  the department as it automated the  workflows. This enabled the department to successfully simplify and streamline its workflows during the course of automating them. The end result has been more efficient processing of archival collections and better service for our patrons.

A review of the requirements showed a need for two types of functionality:
  1. task management, and 
  2. archival content management.
Business process:
  • Systematic management, measurement and improvement of all company processes through cross-functional teamwork and employee empowerment.
  • Standardize activities and processes in order to improve organizational efficiency
  • Business process: “a series of interrelated activities, crossing functional boundaries, with specific inputs and outputs.”
  • The tools that will be examined are process mapping, process modeling, statements of work, and use cases. Processes are modeled using at least one of the following charts: general process charts, process flow diagrams, process activity charts, or flowcharts.
  • Flowcharts are useful in identifying decision points and parallel activities in a process.gain an understanding of the sequence of activities in the process
  • Statements of Work: A specific statement regarding the requirements needed in a service contract. The statement of work should include all aspects of job requirements, performance and assessment.
  • Use cases also help identify the actors involved in various activities and what they want from those activities. For the purposes of use cases, actors are defined as “anything that interfaces with your system—for example, people, other software, hardware devices, data stores, or networks. Each actor defines a particular role.” Use cases typically include two components—a diagram featuring the actor(s) and how they interact with the system and a flow of events statement. The flow of events statement is “a series of declarative statements listing the steps of a use case from the actor’s point of view.”
  • ProcessMaker provides a SOW template that aided the project in automating the workflow comprising the department’s implementation of the archival business process.
  • The use of BPM tools and techniques in the Perry Special Collections provided the department with a methodology to examine and improve the workflow used to provide access to archival materials.
  • Business processes enable leaders to make informed decisions that can improve library’s abilities to deliver their services. 
  • BPM tools are not difficult to use and provide a wide range of benefits. Library leaders should use BPM tools to lead successful change initiatives.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images

A picture is worth a thousand (coherent) words: building a natural description of images. Google Research Blob.
Google has developed a machine-learning system that can automatically produce captions to accurately describe images the first time it sees them. It can describe a complex scene which requires a deeper representation of what’s going on in the scene, capturing how the various objects relate to one another and translating it all into natural-sounding language. The full paper "Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator" is here.

Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport.

Quantifying and Valuing the Wellbeing Impacts of Culture and Sport. Daniel Fujiwara, et al. UK Department for Culture, Media & Sport. April 2014. PDF

A study to develop the evidence base on the well-being impacts of cultural engagement that provides new evidence of the link between our policies and the social impacts of engagement in culture.This presents the results of an analysis of the association between culture, sport and measures of subjective well-being.

When allocating scarce public resources, we would ideally like to know the costs and benefits of different allocating decisions.

A significant association was also found between frequent library use and reported well being. Using libraries frequently was valued at £1,359 per person per year for library users, or £113 per person per month, the third highest value.
  

Monday, December 08, 2014

Agreement Elements for Outsourcing Transfer of Born Digital Content.

Agreement Elements for Outsourcing Transfer of Born Digital Content. Ricky Erway, Ben Goldman and Matthew McKinley. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. 2014. [PDF]
The article Swatting the Long Tail of Digital Media: A Call for Collaboration (2012) held that few institutions would be able to have the hardware, software, and expertise to be able to read all digital media types. A group of archival practitioners started a pilot project to test outsourcing of the transfer of content from physical media they couldn’t read in-house. They realized the need for agreements between repositories and service providers to spell out the terms of such collaboration. The group began compiling a list of elements that should be considered when creating these agreements.

This article suggests elements to consider when creating an agreement for outsourcing the transfer of born-digital content from a physical medium, while encouraging adherence to both archival principles and technical requirements. The main areas are:
  1. General Provisions: desired outcome, description of work, responsibilities and liabilities
  2. Information Supplied by Service Provider: handling instructions
  3. Information Supplied by Client: content, inventory,
  4. Statement of Work: processing, exceptions, documentation, delivery, acceptance
  5. Cost and Liability: schedule of costs and charges, responsibilities of each party
The parties should agree upon a clear set of requirements regarding the services that the Service Provider is to provide. 




Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Want a 100TB disk drive? You'll have to wait 'til 2025

Want a 100TB disk drive? You'll have to wait 'til 2025. . Computerworld. Nov 25, 2014.

An industry consortium released a road map showing that new recording technologies could yield 100TB hard drives in about 10 years.

As disk drive densities increase, the potential for data errors also increases due to a phenomenon known as superparamagnetism, where the magnetic pull between bits on a platter's surface can randomly flip them, thus changing their value from one to zero or zero to one. "Thus higher storage capacities requires the introduction of new digital storage technology."

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Introducing the New Forever Flash: The Best Business Model in Storage Gets Even Better

Pure Storage has introduced a new approach to storage: a plan called Forever Flash. They view it as perpetual storage [in the business sense, not in the digital preservation sense]. It is intended to help customers get off of the expensive and disruptive 3-year tech refresh and replace cycle. It is maintenance coverage that proactively protects all hardware and software on the array with replacement parts and support as needed, including SSDs, for as long as a customer remains on maintenance and support.

- 11.20.2014

Monday, November 24, 2014

Curation Costs Exchange: Supporting Smarter Investments in Digital Curation

Curation Costs Exchange: Supporting Smarter Investments in Digital Curation. Sarah Middleton. Educause Review Online. November 10, 2014.

Tools to manage and estimate costs have not been integrated into other digital curation processes or tools. To determine why that is so a consortium of 13 European cost modeling specialists launched the Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation (4C) project.

4C seeks to help organizations better understand the costs and benefits of digital curation and preservation, and to help users draw together existing and useful resources so they can both make their own assessment of existing models and develop their own cost modeling exercises. The Curation Costs Exchange (CCEx), a platform for the exchange and comparison of digital curation costs and cost information, is a key 4C project deliverable developed to support these goals.

The Cost Comparison Tool enables the exchange of sensitive data and gives users the opportunity to identify greater efficiencies, better practices, and valuable information exchanges among peers. There is also the Understand Your Costs toolkit. The Economic Sustainability Reference model highlights key digital curation concepts, relationships, and decision points in a complex problem space, helping users benchmark and compare their own local models.

Are libraries sustainable in a world of free, networked, digital information?


Are libraries sustainable in a world of free, networked, digital information? Lluís Anglada. El profesional de la información. 7 November 2014. [PDF]

Interesting article looking at libraries through the stages of modernization, automation and digitization, and at a formula for evaluating the importance of libraries to society. The article concludes that "if the current generation of librarians does not introduce radical changes in the role of libraries, their future is seriously threatened."

The formula proposed is the sustainability is equal to the value divided by the cost, and the value is the use minus the dysfunctions and modified by the perceptions of the library
"S= (U - D + 2P) / C".

Libraries are changing because of technology and needs, but there is a danger that people will perceive them as unable to provide the information that users demand. If this continues, those funding the libraries will provide less support. The perceptions must change in order for libraries to be sustainable.
Some thoughts from the article:
  • Libraries are changing from being a space to store, locate and use books to places where people interact and socialize. This should transform the perception that citizens have of their libraries, seeing them as places to ‘change lives by giving people the tools they need to succeed’.
  • Libraries depend on public funding, and their future depends on the perception or mental image of libraries held by administrators and policy makers who allocate budgets  
  • Libraries used to show statistical data on resources; they must now show their value to those who support them financially 
  • The emergence of new roles for libraries does not mean that all library services have evolved over time. In the new environment, some traditional strengths of libraries are weakening.
  • Library catalogues and automated systems were innovative in the ’80s, but have been stuck in outmoded practices. Users have adapted quickly to the ‘googlization’ of information and do not understand why they should have to look in different places to get a unique solution to an information need. 
  • Two key elements for future library sustainability: perception and adaptation to a new paradigm
  • The perception of libraries remains increasingly attached to the printed book, from 69% of Americans in 2005, to 75% in 2010.
  • Libraries may end up being seen as useful only to preserve the past (i.e. the printed book), and consequently of little use to handle digital information.
  • The library has been steadily declining in importance in university budgets.
  • People sustain libraries because of a positive perception and a feeling that the libraries are important. We believe that society still needs the functions performed by libraries and librarians, but the feeling alone does not make them immediately sustainable. 
  • We must soon establish a new stereotype of ‘library’ in people’s minds, one that is not based on the physicality of the buildings or books, but focuses on the role of support and assistance in the difficult process of using information and transforming it into knowledge. 
  • The creation of perceptions of a library and librarian that are associated with assistance regarding information is a contribution that has not yet been made. 
  • This is the challenge and responsibility for young librarians: to create a new perception of our profession. We must establish a new stereotype of ‘library’ in peoples’ minds, one that
    is not based on the physicality of the buildings and books, but on the role of support and assistance in the difficult process of using information and transforming it into knowledge.


BYU professor leads the way in digitizing Victorian era literature.

BYU professor leads the way in digitizing Victorian era literature. Aaron Butler, Jaren Wilkey. BYU News Release. November 20, 2014.
The Victorian Short Fiction Project is a research venture to get students more involved in exploring the Victorian  literature in BYU's special collections library. The project wiki has nearly 200 transcribed stories in an online repository, viewed more than 150,000 times.
  • “I wanted [the students] to experience the sense of discovery that comes from archival research and to sample literature beyond their anthology,”
  • “The purpose of the project is the students. We are training the next generation of digital humanists — people who are trained in the humanities but see the potential of digital technology. The students’ electronic texts reach far beyond the classroom and will reside in a public space after the semester ends. One of the most important legacies we can pass on to our students is an understanding and appreciation of the strengths of both material and electronic texts. They will need to be stewards of both.”

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Digital Preservation File Format Policies of ARL Member Libraries: An Analysis

Digital Preservation File Format Policies of ARL Member Libraries: An Analysis. Kyle Rimkus et al. D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2014.

Repository managers often create a smaller set of formats to simplify management; the formats vary by institutions. Many institutions have a migration strategy to migrate digital objects from the great multiplicity of formats used to create digital materials to a smaller, more manageable number of standard formats that can still encode the complexity of structure and form of the original.

Open file formats are generally preferred to closed, proprietary formats because the way they encode content is transparent. On the other hand, adoption of a proprietary file format by a broad community of content creators, disseminators and users, is often considered a reliable indicator of that format's longevity. Additional qualities such as complexity, the presence of digital rights management controls, and external dependencies are also seen as relevant factors to consider when assessing file formats for preservation. There is, however, no fail-safe formula for file format policy decisions. Here are some of the formats that are most mentioned in preservation policies:

The five most commonly occurring file formats in all policies:
  1. Tagged Image File Format (extension TIFF, or TIF) (115),
  2. Waveform Audio File Format (WAV) (80), 
  3. Portable Document Format (PDF) (74), 
  4. JPEG (JPG, JPEG) (70), and 
  5. Plain text document (TXT, ASC) (69). 
The five most frequently occurring file formats given High Confidence in all policies:
  1. Tagged Image File Format (TIFF, TIF) (88), 
  2. Plain text document (TXT, ASC) (52), 
  3. Portable Document Format (PDF) (49), 
  4. Waveform Audio File Format (WAV) (47), and 
  5. Extensible Markup Language (XML) (47). 
 The five most frequently occurring file formats given Medium Confidence in all policies:
  1. Quicktime (MOV, QT) (47), 
  2. Microsoft Excel (XLS) (39), 
  3. Microsoft Word (DOC) (38), 
  4. Microsoft Powerpoint (PPT) (38), and 
  5. RealAudio (RAM, RA, RM) (35).

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Five steps to decide what data to keep

Five steps to decide what data to keep. Angus Whyte. Digital Curation Centre. 31 October 2014.
This guide aims to help UK Higher Education Institutions aid their researchers in making informed choices about what research data to keep.

It will be relevant to researchers making decisions on a project-by-project basis, or formulating departmental guidelines. It assumes that decisions on particular datasets will normally be made by researchers with advice from the appropriate staff (e.g. academic liaison librarians) and taking into account any institutional policy on Research Data Management (RDM) and guidance available within their own domain.

Step 1. Identify purposes that the data could fulfill
Step 2. Identify data that must be kept
Step 3. Identify data that should be kept
Step 4. Weigh up the costs
Step 5. Complete the data appraisal
 
The final step is to weigh the value of the data and any costs still to be incurred, "considering the long-terms aims, the qualities you identified, the time and money already invested in it and the risks of being unable to prepare any ‘must keep’ data for preservation."


  • t be kept
  • Step 3. Identify data that should be kept
  • Step 4. Weigh up the costs
  • Step 5. Complete the data appraisal
  • - See more at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/five-steps-decide-what-data-keep#sthash.bSZLU9IQ.dpuf
    Angus Whyte, Published: 31 October 2014
    Angus Whyte, Published: 31 October 2014
    Angus Whyte, Published: 31 October 2014
    2014
    Angus Whyte, Published: 31 October

    Friday, November 14, 2014

    Guidelines for the creation of an institutional policy on digital preservation.

    Guidelines for the creation of an institutional policy on digital preservation. Nestor. November 2014. [PDF].
    nestor (Network of Expertise in long-term STORage and accessibility of digital resources in Germany) has just translated its guidelines on institutional preservation policies into English. The guideline provides digital archives with assistance in creating their own institutional policy on digital preservation. It address the questions:
    1. What is the purpose of a policy?
    2. What must a policy cover?
    3. How is a policy produced?
    It also addresses policies in cooperative long term preservation and gives a generic example of a institutional policy. Some items of note:
    • the publication of institutional preservation policies has emerged as a good way to increase transparency. A policy document helps an institution to understand the challenges and to commit to a task.
    • It sets out lastingly effective basic strategic and organisational elements of a digital archive and helps to increase confidence overall. In this way policies help to preserve the digital information of yesterday and today in a reliable manner and to safeguard it for tomorrow’s users.
    • Digital preservation is not an end in itself; it is always aimed at a "designated community".
    • A digital archive needs a systematically developed and generally complex technical infrastructure.
    • The construction of the technical infrastructure is thus dependent on the overall strategic and tactical planning of the institution as a whole, which ought to remain stable and as independent as possible from the rapid technological changes in the digital world.
    • The establishment of preservation policies can, under both scenarios, make a significant contribution to clarity in relation to the areas for joint action, differences, opportunities and risks that can be created.
    This is an excellent resource on writing digital preservation policies.

    POWRR Tool Grid

    POWRR Tool Grid. COPTR Consortium. November 2014.
         The Digital POWRR Project has produced version 2 of the Digital POWRR Tools Grid. The Grid, which helps practitioners find software tools to solve their digital preservation challenges, provides information about almost 400 digital preservation tools.The Tools Grid can also be found on a new domain for community owned digital preservation resources: Digipres Commons.

    Digipres Commons highlights useful collaborative preservation resources from around the web as well as hosting these other collaborative services:
    • The COPTR tools registry
    • The Digital Preservation Question and Answer site
    • The File Formats aggregation service
    The main topics of tools, subdivided by material or format, are:
    •  Access, Use and Reuse 
    •  Create or Receive (Acquire) 
    •  Cross-Lifecycle Functions 
    •  Dispose 
    •  Ingest 
    •  Preservation Action 
    •  Preservation Planning 
    •  Store 

    Seagate preps for 30TB laser-assisted hard drives

    Seagate preps for 30TB laser-assisted hard drives. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld.
    Seagate Technology is boosting investments in laser-assisted hard disk drive which it projects could  theoretically increase disk capacity to 30TB by 2016 - 2020.

    Wednesday, November 05, 2014

    Maturity levels & Preservation Policies

    Maturity levels & Preservation Policies.
    Report of a presentation given at the iPRES 2014 conference in Melbourne on the SCAPE Preservation Policies. The presentation explained the SCAPE Preservation Policy Model and also  summarized / analysed the findings of 40 actual preservation policies. Organisations often overstretch themselves in formulating preservation policies that are not in line with their maturity (based on the Maturity Model.)

    Sunday, November 02, 2014

    ARMA 2014: The Convergence of Records Management and Digital Preservation

    ARMA 2014: The Convergence of Records Management and Digital Preservation. Howard Loos, Chris Erickson. October 2014. [PDF]
    Presentation on records management and digital preservation given at the ARMA 2014 conference.
    Notes:
    • Records Management mission: To assist departments in fulfilling their responsibility to identify and manage records and information in accordance with legal, regulatory, and operational requirements
    • RIM Life Cycle to DP Life Cycle
    • Challenges and successful approaches
    • Storing records permanently with M-Discs
    • Introduction to Digital Preservation, challenges, format sustainability, media obsolescence, metadata, organizational challenges,
    • Life of digital media
    • Best practices and processes
    • OAIS model
    • Rosetta Digital Preservation System
    • Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach & Education (DPOE) Network

    Why Netflix sends 'Orange is the New Black' to the Library of Congress on videotape

    Why Netflix sends 'Orange is the New Black' to the Library of Congress on videotape. And why the library hopes that's going to change. Adi Robertson. The Verge. October 29, 2014.
    After companies shut down and collectors lose interest, the Library of Congress is supposed to keep our cultural history intact. But digital media has turned our understanding of preservation on its head.
    Artists regularly register their work with the US Copyright Office and as part of the process, they send a copy, in some cases a physical copy to the registrars which is then stored by the Library of Congress. The physical copies aren’t the final storage method, just a way to get the file to the library, which then uploads them to its database. Delivering digital files on potentially lower-quality tapes and discs instead of transmitting them directly is an awkward stopgap. A pilot program is in process to allow studios to transfer files directly to the Library of Congress and the US Copyright Office.

    Thursday, October 30, 2014

    2014 DPOE Training Needs Assessment Survey

    2014 DPOE Training Needs Assessment Survey. Barrie Howard, Susan Manus. The Signal. Library of Congress. October 29, 2014.
    The survey was an effort to get a sense of the state of digital preservation practice and understand more about what capacity exists for organizations and professionals to effectively preserve digital content.
    The most significant takeaways are:
    1. an overwhelming expression of concern that respondents ensure their digital content is accessible for 10 or more years (84%), 
    2. evidence of a strong commitment to support employee training opportunities (83%). 
    3. a substantial increase across all organizations in paid full-time or part-time professional staff with practitioner experience (13%)
    The type of digital content held by each institution:
    1. reformatted material digitized from collections already held (83%), 
    2. born-digital content created by and for your organization trails close behind (76.4%). 
    3. deposited digital materials managed for other individuals or institutions (45%). 

    Investing in Curation: A shared path to sustainability.

    Investing in Curation: A shared path to sustainability. 4C Project. October 20, 2014.

    Digital curation involves managing, preserving and adding value to digital assets over their entire lifecycle. The active management of digital assets maximises their reuse potential, mitigates the risk of obsolescence and reduces the likelihood that their long-term value will diminish. However, this requires effort so there are costs associated with this activity. As the range of organisations responsible for managing and providing access to digital assets over time continues to increase, the cost of digital curation has become a significant concern for a wider range of stakeholders.

    Establishing how much investment an organisation should make in its curation activities is a difficult question. If a shared path can be agreed that allows the costs and benefits of digital curation to be collectively assessed, shared and understood, a wider range of stakeholders will be able to make more efficient investments throughout the lifecycle of the digital assets in their care. With a shared vision, it will be easier to assign roles and responsibilities to maximise the return on the investment of digital curation and to clarify questions about the supply and demand of curation services. This will foster a healthier and more effective marketplace for services and solutions and will provide a more robust foundation for tackling future grand challenges.

    Situating the Roadmap:  The six messages in the roadmap have been carefully considered to effect a step change in attitudes over the next five years. It starts with a focus on the costs of digital curation—but the end point and the goal is to bring about a change in the way that all organisations think about and sustainably manage their digital assets.

    D5.1 - Draft Roadmap ( PDF - 2.5 MB)


    Digital Preservation Network (DPN) Launches Member Content Pilot

    Digital Preservation Network (DPN) Launches Member Content Pilot. Carol Minton Morris. Duraspace.org. 2014-10-29. 
    DPN has launched a Member Content Pilot program as a step toward establishing an operational, long-term preservation system. The pilot is testing real-world interactions between DPN members through DPN “nodes” that ingest data from DPN members and package it for preservation storage. Chronopolis/Duracloud, The Texas Preservation Node, and the Stanford Digital Repository will be functioning as First Nodes. APTrust and HathiTrust, in addition to the above three, will be providing replication services for the pilot data.

    NTT Data Digitizes Vatican Library Manuscripts for Online

    NTT Data Digitizes Vatican Library Manuscripts for Online. Jun Hongo. Blog: Wall Street Journal, Japan Realtime. Oct 28, 2014.
    NTT Data signed an initial agreement with the Vatican to work on about 3,000 of the approximately 80,000 manuscripts owned by the library, which was established in 1475. Some of the items it holds date back to the 2nd century. There are about 50 staff members working on the project, at a cost of about $21.3 million. The finished manuscripts are available online.

    Wednesday, October 29, 2014

    4 Ways Academic Libraries Are Adapting For The Future

    4 Ways Academic Libraries Are Adapting For The Future. Brad Lukanic. Fast Company. October 24, 2014.
    Instead of becoming obsolete, academic libraries are changing and becoming more relevant.
    • Libraries have become the heart of the spirit of collaboration and innovation--going beyond being places to merely access knowledge to become hubs to truly explore and create.
    • Universities around the country are evolving their libraries into catalysts for discovery, learning, collaboration, and scholarly breakthroughs.
    • Each institution requires a unique vision for creating an intellectual center for 21st-century teaching, learning and collaboration. That vision must reflect the institution’s own voice and decide what it means to support the creation of academic scholarship. 
    • Libraries must offer learning opportunities and access to local and global networks of information, with the ability to easily create and share knowledge. 
    • Libraries must offer the settings and tools to foster discovery and learning in a dynamic academic framework.
    Four key areas critical to the changing landscape for academic libraries:

    1. Respond to strategic campus and business needs
    2. Infuse technology infused in every aspect of service 
    3. Embrace flexibility
    4. Create places to engage
    Academic libraries are changing from a repository of collections to a catalyst for discovery and creation, where people, knowledge, and research intersect to resolve our world’s greatest challenges.