File Extensions and Digital Preservation

File Extensions and Digital Preservation. Laura Schroffel. In  Metadata Specialists Share Their Challenges, Defeats, and Triumphs. Marissa Clifford. The Iris. October 17, 2016
     The post looks at metadata challenges with digital preservation. Most of the born-digital material they work with exists on outdated or quickly obsolescing media, such as floppy disks, compact discs, hard drives, and flash drives that are transferred into their Rosetta digital preservation repository, and accessible through Primo.

"File extensions are a key piece of metadata in born-digital materials that can either elucidate or complicate the digital preservation process". The extensions describe format type, provide clues to file content, and indicate a file that may need preservation work. The extension is an external label that is human readable, often referred to as external signatures. "This is in contrast to internal signatures, a byte sequence modelled by patterns in a byte stream, the values of the bytes themselves, and any positioning relative to a file."

Their born-digital files are processed on a Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device ( FRED) which can acquire data from many types of media, such as Blu-Ray, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, Compact Flash, Micro Drives, Smart Media, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, xD Cards, Secure Digital Media and Multimedia Cards. The workstation also has the Forensic Toolkit (FTK) software is capable of processing a file and can indicate the file format type and often the software version. There are challenges since file extensions are not standardized or unique, such as naming conflicts between types of software, or older Macintosh systems that did not require files extensions. Also, because FRED and FTK originated in  law enforcement, challenges arise when using it to work with cultural heritage objects.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Closing the Gap in Born-Digital and Made-Digital Curation

Closing the Gap in Born-Digital and Made-Digital Curation. Jessica Tieman, Mike Ashenfelder. The Signal. April 21, 2016. 
     The post is about an upcoming symposium that refers to “Digital Frenemies”. The author observes that a trend in digital stewardship divides expertise into “made digital” and “born digital.” The landscape of the digital preservation field should not be divided like that. "Rather, the future will be largely defined by the symbiotic relationships between content creation and format migration. It will depend on those endeavors where our user communities intersect rather than lead to us to focus on challenges specific to our individual areas of the field."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Teaching Files: Incorporating Born-Digital Materials into Instruction

Teaching Files: Incorporating Born-Digital Materials into Instruction. Dorothy Waugh. CurateGear 2016. January 14, 2016.

• Establish a sustainable model for the integration of born-digital materials into instruction programs
• Help faculty and students use born-digital collections and promote greater understanding
• Explore requirements and policies needed to use born-digital materials in the classroom and library
• Train Library staff to talk confidently  about born-digital materials and provide support for research methods using born-digital materials

Voyant Tools: Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment to work with texts in a variety of formats, including plain text, HTML, XML, PDF, RTF, and MS Word.

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.

Big Web data, small focus: An ethnosemiotic approach to culturally themed selective Web archiving

Big Web data, small focus: An ethnosemiotic approach to culturally themed selective Web archiving. Saskia Huc-Hephe. Big Data & Society. July 2015.

     The fundamental purpose of a Web archive is to retain a version of the fragile and ephemeral digital material found on the Internet for posterity, thereby providing a lasting record of Web objects deemed to be of intellectual and cultural value to current and future generations. A web archive collects only material found on the Internet, safeguarding it from future obsolescence as the internet changes. It is not a record of data, nor a copy, but an entity composed of digital material brought together in a  more restricted environment. 

The article talks about curating a smaller, thematically selected web collection as part of a larger web archive, effectively an archive within an archive. An example is looking at the French community in London. The individual people may not see themselves as belonging to such a community, which questions the validity of constructing a ‘community’ web archive. So the archiving efforts are more creation than curation. One definition of digital curation is ‘maintaining, and adding value to, a trusted body of digital information for current and future use: in other words, it is the active management and appraisal of digital information over its entire life-cycle’. This definition may not fit with web archiving. The curator of a themed web collection is not necessarily a specialist in archival cataloguing or curation, has deep insider knowledge of the ‘field’ for which the collection has been created.

"The significance of the small-scale, micro-Web-archiving approach foregrounded lies in its deployment as a strategy for overcoming the ‘data deluge’ inevitably triggered by non-selective, catch-all repositories."

Digital Preservation Matters.

National Archives kicks off 'born-digital' transfer

National Archives kicks off 'born-digital' transfer. Mark Say. UKAuthority. 24 June 2015.
The National Archives is looking at the long term issue of keeping records accessible as the technology in which they are originally created changes.

"To make sure born-digital records can be permanently preserved we’re engaged in what we call parsimonious presentation, in which we’re making sure it can be used by the next trends of technology being developed. We want them to be easily viewed in 10 years’ time, although we cannot plan for 100 years as there’s no way we can know what the technology will look like."

“To ensure records will still be used in the same way we want to see what the technology is going to do in the next 10 years.

“Digital preservation is a major international challenge. Digital technology is changing what it means to be an archive and we are responding to these changes.

“These records demonstrate how we are leading the archive sector in embracing the challenges of storing digital information for future generations. We are ensuring that we are ready to keep the nation’s public records safe and accessible for the future, whatever their format.”

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving the Born-Digital Record: Many more questions than answers

Preserving the Born-Digital Record: Many more questions than answers. James G. Neal. American Libraries. May 28, 2015.
The world is producing vast amounts of born-digital material. The volume, complexity, and dynamism of this information challenge us to think creatively about its capture, organization, and long-term preservation and usability. What is the role of the library? Is this a source of failure or opportunity for the global library community?

This is an issue of integrity, of the collective adherence to a code and standard of values, of maintaining human records as complete, unimpaired, and undivided as possible. The ability to consult the evidence and sources used by researchers and authors will be lost if those digital records are not available. The ability to research and investigate the history and current state of our world will be compromised if born-digital materials are gone or changed. The ability to access the sources of record will be difficult if they are deposited and dispersed into multiple and disparate sites. This is the challenge of repository chaos.

At the core of born-digital content preservation and archiving are four principles.

1. We cannot preserve what we have not collected.
2. We must enable access, which brings persistence.
3. We must secure and curate the content.
4. We must take care of the content as steward.

How does born-digital content fit into what libraries do? Libraries select, acquire, synthesize, preserve and archive information, and enable users to understand, use, and apply information. This supports teaching and learning, research and scholarship.

Quality equals content plus functionality. To make sure that the born-digital content is preserved and usable in the long term we must understand and accommodate the important characteristics of digital information. With born-digital resources we must also consider the relationship among form, text, and function, context, renderability, and versioning over time. "We see the inevitability of physical and format obsolescence, the importance of authenticity and provenance, and the role of standards such as globally unique identifiers."

The scope, depth, and cost of the threat mean that individual libraries adequately preserve born-digital content alone. We need to promote cooperation and new public–private partnerships. The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) is an example of this. "We will not have the technologies, tools, workflows, or standards unless we work together in new ways."

Libraries must take on responsibility for the preservation of born-digital content.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Letter to the editor concerning digital preservation of government information

DttP letter to the editor re digital preservation of government information. James R. Jacobs.  ALA Connect. January 26, 2015.
Digital preservation is an incredibly important topic for government information professionals. This letter, in response to previous article, includes several important points for all libraries.

1. Preservation of born-digital information is a very real and important topic that the government documents community needs to understand and address. In a single year, more government information is born-digital than all the printed government information accumulated by all Federal Deposit libraries in over 200 years.
2. Digitization of print information is not a preservation solution. Instead it creates new digital preservation challenges and is really just the first of many costly and technically challenging steps needed to ensure long-term access to content.
3. Access is not preservation; it does not guarantee preservation or long-term access. 
1. Access without preservation is temporary, at best. 
2. Preservation without access is an illusion.
4. Digital preservation is an essential activity of libraries. It cannot be dismissed as the responsibility of others. Digital preservation requires:
1. resources, 
2. a long-term commitment,
3. an understanding of the long-term value of information (even information that is not popular or used by many people), 
4. a commitment to the users of information.  
5. Relying solely on the government or others to preserve its information is risky. “Who is responsible for this preservation?” Libraries should take this responsibility. Libraries can take actions now to promote the preservation of digital information
6. Preserve Paper copies. The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) is successfully preserving paper and micro-form documents. "We often hear that “digitizing” paper documents will “preserve” them, but we do not need to convert these documents to digital in order to preserve them". While digitization can provide better access, usability, and re-usability of many physical documents, it does not guarantee the preservation of the content. Worse, there are repeated calls for digitizing paper collections so that the paper collections can be discarded and destroyed. Such actions will endanger preservation of the content if they do not include adequate steps to ensure digital preservation of those newly created digital objects. 
7. Smart-Archive the Web. Although capturing web pages and preserving them is far from an adequate (or even accurate) form of digital preservation, it is a useful stop-gap until producers understand that depositing preservable digital objects with trusted repositories is the only way to guarantee preservation of their information. Libraries should use web archiving tools and services such as Archive-It.
8. Promote Digital Preservation. Libraries should be actively preserving digital government information. The time of 'passive digital preservation' or looking to others to take care of digital preservation is long past. We can work with others, not leave the work to them.
   
   
   Digital Preservation Matters.

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. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Many Uses of Rhizome’s New Social Media Preservation Tool.

The Many Uses of Rhizome’s New Social Media Preservation Tool.  Benjamin Sutton. Hyperallergic Media. October 21, 2014.

New York’s digital art nonprofit Rhizome is developing Colloq, a conservation tool to help artists preserve social media projects not only by archiving them, but by replicating the exact look and layout of the sites used, and the interactions with other users. The idea for Colloq came from the realization that Rhizome will be unable to accession new, contemporary Internet art if we don’t rethink archival practices. Colloq is still in its early stages of development.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Demystifying Born Digital.

Demystifying Born Digital. Jackie Dooley, Ricky Erway. OCLC Research Library Partnership. 23 August 2012. 

This is a report on a project that enhances the effective management of born-digital materials as they intersect with special collections and archives practices in research libraries. The goal of this activity is to discuss the skills and expertise of archivists and librarians in the born-digital context, show the relevance of those skills, provide a basic roadmap to implement management of born-digital archival materials, and encourage research libraries launch a born-digital management program that can be scaled up over time. The management of born-digital materials in academic and research libraries remains in its infancy.

 

Digital Preservation Matters.