Enduring Access to Rich Media Content: Understanding Use and Usability Requirements

Enduring Access to Rich Media Content: Understanding Use and Usability Requirements. Madeleine Casad, Oya Y. Rieger and Desiree Alexander. D-Lib Magazine. September 2015.
     Media art has been around for for 40 years and presents serious preservation challenges and obsolescence risks, such as being stored on fragile media. Currently there are no archival best practices for these materials.

• Interactive digital assets are far more complex to preserve and manage than regular files. 
• A single interactive work may contain many media files with different types, formats, applications and operating systems. Any failure and the entire presentation may be unviewable.
• Even a minor problem with can compromise an artwork's "meaning." 
• Migrating information files to another storage medium is not enough to preserve their most important cultural content. 
• Emulation is not always an ideal access strategy since it can introduce additional rendering problems and change the original experience.

The article surveyed media art researchers, curators, and artists, in order to better understand the "relative importance of the artworks' most important characteristics for different kinds of media archives patrons." Some of the problems mentioned were the lack of documentation and metadata, discovery and access, and technical support. Also problems with vanishing webpages, link rot, and poor indexing. 

Artists are concerned about the longevity of their creative work; it can be difficult selling works that may become obsolete within a year.  Curators of new media art may not include born-digital interactive media in their holdings because they are too complex or unsustainable. Some preservation strategies rely on migration, metadata creation, maintaining a media preservation lab, providing climate controlled storage, and collecting documentation from the artists. 

They are also concerned about "authenticity" in a cultural rather than technical sense. InterPARES defines an authentic record as "a record that is what it purports to be and is free from tampering or corruption". With digital art this becomes more difficult to do, since restoring ephemeral, technological or experiential artwork may alter its original form in ways that can affect its meaning. Authenticity may be more of "a sense that the archiving institution has made a good-faith commitment to ensuring that the artist's creative vision has been respected, and providing necessary context of interpretation for understanding that vision—and any unavoidable deviations from it".

Curators need to work with artists to ensure that artworks' most significant properties and interpretive contexts were preserved and documented.  This is more than ensuring bit-level fixity checks or technically accurate renderings of an artwork's contents. The key to digital media preservation is variability, not fixity; finding ways to capture the experience so future generations will get a glimpse of how early digital artworks were created, experienced, and interpreted.

Therefore, diligent curation practices are more essential than ever in order to identify unique or exemplary works, project future use, assess loss risks, and implement cost-efficient strategies.

Digital Preservation Matters.

“An alarmingly casual indifference to accuracy and authenticity.” What we know about digital surrogates

“An alarmingly casual indifference to accuracy and authenticity.” What we know about digital surrogates. James A Jacobs. Free Government Information. March 1, 2015.
Post examines several articles concerning the reliability and accuracy of digital text extracted from printed books in five digital libraries: the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, the HathiTrust, Google Books, and the Digital Public Library of America.

In a study by Paul Conway of page images in the HathiTrust, he found 25%  of the 1000 volumes examined by Conway contained at least one page image whose content was “unreadable.” Only 64.9% of the volumes examined were considered accurate and complete enough to be considered “reliably intelligible surrogates.”  HathiTrust only attests to the integrity of the transferred file, and not to the completeness of the original digitization effort. 

The “uncorrected, often unreadable, raw OCR text” that most mass-digitization projects produce today, will be inadequate for future, more sophisticated uses. Libraries that are concerned about their future and their role in the information ecosystem should look to the future needs of users when evaluating digitization projects. Libraries have a special obligation to preserve the historic collections in their charge in an accurate form. 

Cites articles:

•  Kichuk, Diana. “Loose, Falling Characters and Sentences: The Persistence of the OCR Problem in Digital Repository E-Books.” 
• Conway, Paul. “Preserving Imperfection: Assessing the Incidence of Digital Imaging Error in HathiTrust,” 2013.
• Jacobs, James A., and James R. Jacobs. “The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: A Consumer-Oriented Standard.” D-Lib Magazine 19, no. 3/4 (March 2013).
  
  
  Digital Preservation Matters.

When checksums don't match...

When checksums don't match...  Jenny Mitcham. Digital Archiving at the University of York. 2 February 2015.
Post about an example of files that had MD5 errors. Used various utilities to generate the check-sums for both MD5 and SHA1. One program showed a change, while another did not. However, when SHA1 was used, it showed that the files had different check-sums. Possibly an example of bit rot.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard

The Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval: a Consumer-oriented Standard.  James A. Jacobs, James R. Jacobs. D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2013.
"Digital-Surrogate Seal of Approval" (DSSOA) is a proposed way to describe the accuracy and completeness of digital objects that were created from printed books and other non-digital originals. It indicates that the original has been digitized completely and with 100% accuracy. This seal of approval may be applied to a digitized version of an analog original when it accurately replicates the original. To do this, two criteria must be met and verified:

1. Completeness. All pages of the original are fully and completely reproduced.
2. Accuracy. The original layout and appearance are preserved. All text is legible and there is no visual degradation when compared to the original.

The seal of approval, with a Statement of Verification,  can be applied by those responsible for the digital objects at any stage of the life cycle. The Statement of Verification must describe the methodology used and confirm 100% compliance. A "digital surrogate" in this context is a complete, accurate, digital replica of a bibliographically-identified, analog original item. The seal of approval  may be applied to a specific item or to a collection when all items in the collection meet the criteria.  The criteria may be used by organizations that create, manage, preserve, or deliver digital content. They may apply it to items that they curate as a way of communicating to their user-communities the completeness and accuracy of digital surrogates. The article also  addresses metadata elements, requirements and exceptions. This may not be appropriate or necessary for all digitization projects or collections.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Getting the whole picture: Finding a common language between digital preservation and conservation

Getting the whole picture: Finding a common language between digital preservation andconservation. Douglas Elford, et al. 7th AICCM Book, Photographs, and Paper Symposium. August 29-31, 2012. [PDF]

Slides: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/viewFile/2458/2924

http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/nlasp/article/viewArticle/2458

• In spite of the intangible and at times ephemeral nature of digital collections, the fundamental purpose driving both digital preservation and conservation are conceptually quite similar.
• collection policies that suit digital content in the networked environment are, for the most part, yet to be put into practice.
• While some new approaches to collecting digital materials in a proactive manner (including more frequently and via semi-automated mechanisms) are required, it is imperative that the field of digital preservation also borrows from long-established collection and conservation processes and practices that have been refined over decades by preservation professionals
• Acquiring, managing, preserving and providing access to digital culture is a challenge that is faced by all cultural and heritage organisations worldwide  digital preservation is driven by the ongoing long-term access of a digitised item or born-digital collection, whereas preservation strategies for tangible collections are determined by the immediate needs of the item to ensure its stability and longevity, though digital preservation practices could learn and borrow from conservation processes.
• Websites are also inherently time sensitive and ephemeral in nature
• Authenticity of collection items is an influential factor in conservation work. Determining the authenticity of digital objects is equally as important. Considerable effort should be undertaken to ensure that the integrity and authenticity of an item are maintained. 
• Preservation strategies should enhance rather than compromise access to collections. This is also applicable in the digital realm. Before access to digital content can be provided to users, active management and ongoing preservation of digital content is necessary.
• A successful digital preservation policy would also address the preservation needs of digital items created by an institution itself, such as photographs from digitisation programs.
• National Library of Australia uses the Prometheus workflow system, and have developed Mediapedia, an online knowledge-base resource for identifying physical and digital carriers and their associated dependencies.
• Active digital preservation is yet to become mainstream practice in many cultural organisations

   

Digital Preservation Matters.