Managing the preservation and accessibility of public records from the past into the digital future

Managing the preservation and accessibility of public records from the past into the digital future.  Dean Koh. Open Gov.  30 November 2016.
     A post about the Public Record Office of the State Archives of Victoria. They have many paper records but now also a lot of born digital records governments, so the archives is a hybrid paper and digital archives. For accessibility purposes, paper records are digitised to provide online access. The Public Record Office also sets records management standards for government agencies across Victoria. "In the digital environment, there is not a lot of difference between records and information so that means we set standards in the area of information management as well." Access to records is a major focus, including equity of access in a digitally focused age.

"There’s a lot to access that isn’t necessarily ‘just digitise something’, there’s a lot of work to be done in addition to just digitising them. There’s capturing metadata about the digital images because again, if I just take photographs of a whole lot of things and send you the files, that’s not very accessible, you have to open each one and look at it in order to find the one that you want. So we have to capture metadata about each of the images in order to make them accessible so a lot of thinking and work goes into that."

Another issue around records, particularly born digital records, is the different formats used to create records in government. There are a "whole bunch of different technologies" used to create born digital records and the archives is trying to manage the formats and the records so that they "continue to remain accessible into the far future. So 50 years, a 100 years, 200 years, they still need to be accessible because those records are of enduring value to people of Victoria. So that’s a format issue and a format obsolescence issue."

Digital Preservation Matters.

'A' is for AtoM

'A' is for AtoM. Jenny Mitcham. Digital Archiving at the University of York. 18 March 2016.
     Jenny has been working on an implementation of Access to Memory (AtoM) for a couple of years and provides an interesting list of information about it, the A to Z* of implementing AtoM. "It turns out that deciding to adopt a system is relatively simple, working out exactly how you are going to use it is far more complex!" A few that I found that apply in most software situations:

• B is for Business as Usual: Any organisation when adopting a new and complex system like AtoM needs to think beyond initial implementation and consider how the solution can be embedded into their workflows for the longer term?
• E is for Experimenting: We discovered that data may not always import in the way you expect.
• J is for Just Start!: Reading the documentation is essential but testing and experimenting with AtoM are really the best ways of working it out.
• N is for Not Perfect: AtoM (like all complex systems) has its limitations.
• Q is for Quality: In an ideal world, all our data within AtoM would be of a high quality....but we do not live in an ideal world. Accepting that legacy data will not always meet current standards or be as accurate as we would like is key to moving forward with a system such as this.
• T is for Training: Training is not just a one off exercise.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects

Questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects. Sarah Werner. Wynken de Worde. 6 October 2015.
    With new digitization projects that we hear about it may be helpful to ask some questions:

1. Who financially benefits from such agreements? Sometimes researchers forget that the primary commercial digitization projects "isn’t to enable access to cultural heritage materials but to make money. And cultural heritage institutions have not always prioritized open access to their collections over monetizing them, either."
2. Who is going to have access to the resulting images? In commercial projects the results "are typically limited to institutions who can pay to subscribe to the commercial database". 
3. Who is not going to have access to the images? It is important to realize who will be excluded from such projects.  
4. What will you be able to do with the resulting images? "Most commercial databases retain copyright over their digitized products and do not license them beyond personal use".
5. How will this impact the ability of researchers to access the original documents? "If you are a holding institution that will be restricting access to your newly digitized collection, will you help fund scholars to come use your database if their institution doesn’t subscribe to it?"

Without knowing these kinds of details we won't know if these enterprises are "good or bad things". The projects can be expensive, and balancing the access and the cost can be complicated. "But researchers and librarians should ask themselves this list of questions before cheerleading announcements." How will we support institutions in order to "create high quality digitizations without selling our cultural heritage to the highest bidder?"

Digital Preservation Matters.

Heroic Measures: Reflections on the Possibility and Purpose of Digital Preservation

Heroic Measures: Reflections on the Possibility and Purpose of Digital Preservation. David M. Levy. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Third ACM Conference on Digital Libraries.  June 23-26, 1998. [PDF requires a subscription to the journal.]
     A great article from the time when digital preservation was first being discussed and explored. In looking how to move our digital preservation program to the next level, this is a reminder that digital preservation is not about the technical variables but about object integrity and preserving the features that distinguish a work. It is about the use of the object and about the needs of the user, and about society learning how to find its way through life with digital information.

Quotes from the article:

• “Whatever preservation method is applied, however, the central goal must be to preserve information integrity; that is, to define and preserve those features of an information object that distinguish it as a whole and singular work.” The problem comes if one’s focus is exclusively, or too strongly on, the digital object, and at the expense of other considerations, such as use.
• In both the library world and the world of archives, people at times have become so focused on the artifacts themselves that they have risked losing sight of their users or their users’ needs.
• The digital object is that which produces the tangible, perceptible things which people then use. The digital object is necessary but not sufficient. How it is preserved - which features, which behaviors are deemed crucial - is all important, and if these decisions aren’t guided by use considerations, it will be to our detriment.
• “Viewed developmentally, the problem of preserving digital information for the future is not only, or even primarily, a problem of fine-tuning a narrow set of technical variables. It is not a clearly defined problem like preserving the embrittled books that are self destructing from the acid in the paper on which they were printed. Rather, it is a grander problem of organizing ourselves over time and as a society to maneuver effectively in a digital landscape.”

Digital Preservation Matters.

Born-Digital Access in Archival Repositories: Mapping the Current Landscape

Born-Digital Access in Archival Repositories:Mapping the Current Landscape. Preliminary Report. Rachel Appel, et al. Google docs. August 2015.
     This is a document outlining research that will be presented at the SAA meeting and it contains research and a list of resources that looks at how archival best practices for processing and preserving born-digital materials have developed over the last decade. It says there are no "established best practices for providing research access to born-digital materials that scale to match the volume of born-digital material and meet archival standards surrounding authenticity of records, descriptive metadata, and the protection of donor privacy and intellectual property." Archivists in various institutions face pressure to accept born-digital records, but often they have neither the" preparation nor the resources to preserve them or provide access to them.” One of the problems is that  archivists are not involved early enough in the acquisition process. Another is that they are not always consulted when policy decisions are made at the institution.  The biggest challenge access is the "sensitivity of materials--concerns about copyright, confidentiality, privacy,  intellectual property, and personally identifiable information. The second biggest challenge is IT infrastructure and file size structure, or rather, the lack of it (28 respondents).”

The qualitative and quantitative data were examined to pinpoint aspects of born-digital access that participants classified as gaps: areas participants considered highly important in which little or no practical progress has been made. The gaps clustered into the following five overarching themes, listed in order of frequency.

1. Gaps in Tools and Systems
2. Gaps in Business Analysis, Resource Allocation, and Advocacy
3. Gaps in Skills for Archivists, Sharing Information, and Training Each Other
4. Gaps in Understanding Users
5. Gaps in Research and Policy

The five most common aspects of born-digital access that participants were planning to implement were:

1. Access in Reading Room, Remote, and Online (42 mentions)
2. Metadata for Access and Processing (25 mentions)
3. Creation of Copies and Images (19 mentions)
4. Privacy and Redaction (14 mentions)
5. Tools (8 mentions)

Digital Preservation Matters.