Cultural Heritage and Digital Preservation

Iron Mountain And CyArk Join Forces To Digitally Preserve Fort York For Generations To Come. Press Release. IT Business Net. October 04, 2017.
      Fort York is a historical site laden with rich Canadian history. To ensure future generations can continue to learn about and experience the site, it is being preserved in an online virtual library, along with other world heritage sites.  The technology uses 3D laser scanning, photogrammetry, and traditional survey techniques to create an online, 3D library of the world's cultural heritage sites before they are lost to natural disasters, destroyed by human aggression, or ravaged by the passage of time.  In addition, the project will also use virtual reality technology to "transform Fort York into a living legacy". These efforts are part of how they ensure cultural heritage sites will be available for future generations to experience, while making them uniquely accessible today.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The UNESCO/PERSIST Guidelines for the selection of digital heritage for long-term preservation

The UNESCO/PERSIST Guidelines for the selection of digital heritage for long-term preservation. Sarah CC Choy, et al. UNESCO/PERSIST Content Task Force. March 2016.
     The survival of digital heritage is much less assured than its traditional counterparts. “Identification of significant digital heritage and early intervention are essential to ensuring its long-term preservation.” This project was created to help preserve our cultural heritage, and to provide a starting point for institutions creating their policies. Preserving and ensuring access to its digital information is also a challenge for the private sector. Acquiring and collecting digital heritage requires significant effort and resources. It is vital that organizations accept digital stewardship roles and responsibilities.Some thoughts and quotes from the document.

• There is a strong risk that the restrictive legal environment will negatively impact the long-term survival of important digital heritage.
• The challenge of long-term preservation in the digital age requires a rethinking of how heritage institutions identify significance and assess value.
• new forms of digital expression blur boundaries and lines of responsibility and challenge past approaches to collecting.
• libraries, archives, and museums have common interests to each preserve heritage
• heritage institutions must be proactive to identify digital heritage and information for long-term preservation before it is lost.
• Selection is as essential, as it is economically and technically impossible, and often legally prohibited, to collect all current digital heritage. Selecting for long-term preservation will thus be a critical function of heritage institutions in the digital age.
• Selecting digital heritage for long-term preservation may focus primarily on evaluating publications already in their collection, originally acquired for short-term use, rather than assessing new publications for acquisition. 
• Rapid obsolescence in digital formats, storage media, and systems is collapsing the window of opportunity of selection, and increase the risk that records are lost that might not have yet “proved” their significance over time.

Address strategies for collecting digital heritage and develop selection criteria for an institution. Four possible steps to use:

1. Identify the material to be acquired or evaluated
2. Determine the legal obligation to preserve the material
3. Assess the material using three selection criteria: significance, sustainability, and availability
4. Compile the above information and make a decision based on the results

Management of long-term digital preservation and metadata is important. There are five basic functional requirements for digital metadata:

1. Identification of each digital object
2. Location of each digital object so that it can be located and retrieved.
3. Description of digital object is needed for recall and interpretation, both content and context
4. Readability and encoding, in order to remain legible over time.
5. Rights management, including conditions of use and restrictions of each digital item

“The long-term preservation of digital heritage is perhaps the most daunting challenge facing heritage institutions today.”

Digital Preservation Matters.

What happens when the Internet and digital preservation coincide

What happens when the Internet and digital preservation coinicide. Jay Gattuso. jaygattuso's Blog, Open Preservation Foundation. 25th Sep 2016.
     A very thought provoking post that uses a job recruitment post as the basis for a discussion about the library's going digital preservation program, and what happens when they identify a gap in the capability that can’t be ignored. The primary purpose of the Digital Preservation Web Engineer is to "define, implement and support the efficient acquisition, preservation and discovery/delivery of web based digital content subject to the Library’s legislated mandate."  They understand that there is digital, and there is “online”, and sometimes digital is online. It is important to be able to confidently collect online digital content, maintain a sense of content, context and structure but there is a capability gap that they have been working around for a while. There are still many questions deliver content to a readership that is still establishing its own needs. And there is the challenge of doing this on a large scale.

They want the two processes, digital collecting and digital preservation to dovetail into a well-considered unified workflow.While they are all about collecting, storing and preserving important things that are precious to New Zealand, the same concepts hold true for others that collect to their own mission. "We don’t believe this point can be understated. We are slowly start to understand the cultural and research impact of web content, and this new post is a direct response to the challenge that sits behind national level collection building and the rapid uptake of Internet based content and information."

The content collected has an extremely important role in their National memory, and they have an obligation to operate with the care and expertise that this content demands. The collections help people understand their sense of place and history as well as informing research and creative outputs alike.

Their post addresses one of the problems facing digital preservation today. Digital Preservation is "an emergent discipline, finding our way through new challenges, and without specifically crafted routes into the work we expect to undertake. We are only just starting to see the edges of what’s possible, and unless we repeatedly open the door to complimentary professions we are going to struggle to address the contemporary challenge of collecting fast moving content, regardless of the ongoing care required when today’s harvests become tomorrow’s Preservation Masters with all the attendant questions of technical sustainability."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories. Gabriela Redwine, et al. Council on Library and Information Resources. October 2013. [PDF]
     "Until recently, digital media and files have been included in archival acquisitions largely as an afterthought." People may not have understood how to deal with digital materials, or staff may not be prepared to manage digital acquisitions. The object is to offer guidance to rare book and manuscript dealers, donors, repository staff, and other custodians to help ensure that digital materials are handled, documented appropriately, and arrive at repositories in good condition, and each section provides recommendations for donors, dealers, and repository staff..

The sections of the report cover:

• Initial Collection Review
• Privacy and Intellectual Property
• Key Stages in Acquiring Digital Materials
• Post-Acquisition Review by the Repository
• Appendices, which include: 
• Potential Staffing Activities for the Repository
• Preparing for the Unexpected: Recommendations
• Checklist of Recommendations for Donors and Dealers, and Repositories

Some thoughts and quotes from the report:

• it is vital to convince all parties to be mindful of how they handle, document, ship, and receive digital media and files.
• Early communication also helps repository staff take preliminary steps to ensure the archival and file integrity, as well as the usability of digital materials over time.
• A repository’s assessment criteria may include technical characteristics, nature of the relationship between born-digital and paper materials within a collection, information about context and content, possible transfer options, and particular preservation challenges.
• Understand if there is a possibility that the digital records include the intellectual property of people besides the creator or donor of the materials.
• Clarify in writing what digital materials will be transferred by a donor to a repository
  (e.g., hard drives, disks, e-mail archives, websites)
• It is strongly recommended that donors and dealers seek the
  guidance of archival repositories before any transfer takes place.
• To avoid changing the content, formatting, and metadata associated with the files, repositories
  must establish clear protocols for the staff’s handling of these materials.

The good practices in this report can help reduce archival problems with digital materials. "Early
archival intervention in records and information management will help shape the impact on archives of user and donor idiosyncrasies around file management and data backup."

Digital Preservation Matters.

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.

Russian Official Proposes International Investigation Into U.S. Moon Landings. Cultural Preservation?

Russian Official Proposes International Investigation Into U.S. Moon Landings. Ingrid Burke. The Moscow Times.  June 16, 2015.
Russia's Investigative Committee spokesman, Vladimir Marki, called for an international investigation to (among other things) solve the mystery of the disappearance of film footage from the original moon landing in 1969. "But all of these scientific - or perhaps cultural - artifacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened."

 [Interesting that the political wranglings have now reached the level of  historical archiving and cultural preservation.]
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Threeding Uses Artec 3D Scanning Technology to Catalog 3D Models for Bulgaria’s National Museum of Military History

Threeding Uses Artec 3D Scanning Technology to Catalog 3D Models for Bulgaria’s National Museum of Military History. Bridget Butler Millsaps. 3D Printer & 3D Printing News. February 20, 2015.
The National Museum of Military History is collaborating on a 3D scanning technology to preserve physical pieces of history by creating 3D digital models. With the scans, the museum can create a virtual museum. It also plans to share the models online and allow the public to use 3D printing images to print replicas of the artifacts.

Digital Preservation Matters.

ForgetIT

ForgetIT. Website. January 23, 2015. 

While preservation of digital content is now well established in memory institutions such as national libraries and archives, it is still in its infancy in most other organizations, and even more so for personal content. ForgetIT combines three new concepts to ease the adoption of preservation in the personal and organizational context: 

1. Managed Forgetting: resource selection as a function of attention and significance dynamics. Focuses on characteristic signal reduction. It relies on information assessment and offers options such as full preservation, removing redundancy, resource condensation, and complete digital forgetting. 
2. Synergetic Preservation: making intelligent preservation processes a part of the content life cycle and by developing solutions for smooth transitions.
3. Contextualized Remembering: keeping preserved content meaningful by combining context extraction and re-contextualization.

The main expected outcomes are the flexible Preserve-or-Forget Framework for intelligent preservation management and, on top of it, two application pilots: one for personal preservation focusing and one for organizational preservation. It is an important step for managing and preserving new forms of community memory and cultural history. It is also an alternative to the “keep it all” approach in our digital society.

Digital Preservation Matters.

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.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Reel to Real: Sound at the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Reel to Real: Sound at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Pitt Rivers Museum website. April 2013.
Reel to Real is the archival sound project at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. [One of my favorite museums.] It describes methods used to digitize wax cylinders, reel to reel tapes, audio cassettes and other formats in the Museum's ethnographic sound archive. Also included are examples of the archival sounds from the collections.  This has been done to connect the sounds with "wider collections and to engage diverse audiences".

Digital Preservation Matters.

To Save and Project Fest: Long Live Cinema!

To Save and Project Fest: Long Live Cinema!  J. Hoberman. The Village Voice. October 12, 2011.
Digital might be the future of the motion-picture medium, but for film preservation, it’s a mixed blessing. Archivists make it clear that digital technology is part of the solution—and part of the problem. Digital cinema is itself difficult to preserve, subtly distorts (by “improving”) the celluloid image, even as it often dictates (through commercial considerations) those movies deemed worthy of preservation. New York Times DVD critic Dave Kehr has pointed out that instead of increasing access, each new distribution platform (from 35mm to 16mm, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and online streaming) has narrowed the range of titles in active distribution and diminished the proportion of available films. Film restoration is also the restoration of cultural memory.

Google helps put Dead Sea Scrolls online

Google helps put Dead Sea Scrolls online. BBC News.  26 September 2011.

Ultra-high resolution images of several Dead Sea Scrolls are now available on line.  Five scrolls have been digitized (1,200 megapixel images); they are The Temple Scroll, The War Scroll, The Community Rule Scroll, The Great Isaiah Scroll, and The Commentary of Habakkuk Scroll.  

Hawaiian Heritage sites set to launch on CyArk website.

Hawaiian Heritage sites set to launch on CyArk website. Press release. Hawaii 24/7. August 10, 2011.   
CyArk, with the help of its partners, conducted the field work for the Digital Preservation of three culturally significant Hawaiian sites, which include site animations, photography, panoramas, perspectives, and drawings. This information will showcase oft-overlooked heritage sites and highlight the need for cultural resource preservation.

CyArk is a non profit organization with the mission of digitally preserving cultural heritage sites through collecting, archiving and providing open access to data created by laser scanning, digital modeling, and other state-of-the-art technologies.