Introduction to Digital Preservation: What is Digital Preservation?

Introduction to Digital Preservation: What is Digital Preservation? Bodleian Libraries, Oxford LibGuides. Aug 28, 2018.    
     Digital preservation at Bodleian Libraries is defined as: "The formal activity of ensuring access to digital information for as long as necessary. It requires polices, planning, resource allocation (funds, time, people) and appropriate technologies and actions to ensure accessibility, accurate rendering and authenticity of digital objects.  A “lifecycle management” approach to digital preservation is taken, where action is done at regular intervals and future activity is planned. This includes policies and recommendations for appraising and selecting digital information to preserve, acknowledging resources are finite."

There are two different kinds of digital preservation:

1.  Bit-level Preservation: a "very basic level of preservation of the digital object as it was submitted (literally preserving the bits forming a digital object)." It is a beginning step to the more complete set of digital preservation practices and processes that ensure the survival and usability of digital materials over time.
2. Logical Preservation: The part of preservation management that ensures the continued usability of content by ensuring the existence of a usable manifestation the digital object. Sometimes  referred to as format preservation or active preservation, it includes

• Understanding what digital materials are in the repository.
• Identifying threats to the materials and planning actions to be taken for at-risk digital materials
• Putting things into action 

Defining other terms:

• "Digital curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital files throughout their lifecycle—not just at the end of their active lives. This active management of digital files reduces threats to their long-term value and mitigates the risk of digital obsolescence. Digital curation includes digital preservation, but the term adds the curatorial aspects of: selection, appraisal and ongoing enhancement of the object for reuse."It is commonly used in the science and social sciences for research data and is often being replaced with research data management, especially when referring to active digital files.
• Digital archiving is often used interchangeably with digital preservation in archives. It has two main definitions used by computing personnel and archivists and librarians respectively. Recognize both definitions of the term and be aware of the audiences that use this term differently.

1. The process of storage, backup and ongoing maintenance as opposed to strategies for long-term digital preservation
2. the long-term storage, preservation and access to information that is "born digital" or for which the digital version is considered to be the primary archive 

• Digital Stewardship, more commonly used in the US, "combines both curation and preservation—the active life of a digital asset and its continual preservation afterwards for long-term use. But this school of thought splits digital curation & digital preservation into two separate categories and then uses digital stewardship as the umbrella term."

The Bodleian Librarians consider digital preservation to be a "holistic term that includes aspects of digital curation and stewardship". They work with creators to organise and manage their digital objects to preserve them, to follow best practice for creation and managing active files so that they will be easier to manage and provide access to in the long-term.


See also:

• Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital Stewardship: What’s in (Some) Names?
• What is digital preservation? CESSDA, 2011.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Exploring Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, and Digital Collections in Mexico

Exploring Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, and Digital Collections in Mexico. Natalie Baur. bloggERS! February 22, 2017.    
     This is a post about international perspectives on digital preservation and relating to the state of digital preservation initiatives and digital information access in Mexico. Interviews were conducted with organizations working on building, managing, sharing and preserving their digital collections. The findings indicate:

• The focus on digital collection building and preservation in business and government tends toward records management approaches. 
• "While the guidelines and processes for paper records are robust, many institutions are only beginning to implement and use electronic records management platforms."
• Long-term digital preservation of permanent records designated is an ongoing challenge.
• In academic, archives, and cultural heritage institutions, digital collection work is focused on digitization, storage and access of digitized assets, as well as issues related to long-term, sustainable maintenance of digital collections.
• While digital preservation issues are still in the early stage of development. In Mexico and Latin America, this has mostly been done through participation in the InterPARES project. Several Mexican academic and government institutions have taken the lead on digital preservation issues, and a more cohesive, intentional organization progress in the near future.

"It is now more crucial than ever for librarians, archivists, developers, administrators, and program leaders to look outside of the United States for collaborations and opportunities to learn with and from colleagues abroad." We need to share resources, perspectives, diversity, and world wide improvements.

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.

Digital Curation and the Public: Strategies for Education and Advocacy

Digital Curation and the Public: Strategies for Education and Advocacy. Jaime Mears, Mike Ashenfelder. The Signal. April 6, 2016.
     The Washington DC Public Library hosted Digital Curation and the Public: Strategies for Education and Advocacy that included a tour of the Memory Lab, a public-facing digitization lab, and a workshop, Methods of promoting digital curation to the public, that reaches the audience by creating targeted promotional and educational material about digital preservation.

• Case studies are incredibly effective,  "especially when the absence of a digital record proves why it should have been preserved". 
• Other methods include train-the-trainer programs and creating engaging educational resources, such as the Activist’s Guide to Archiving Video.
• Sometimes effectiveness is a matter of timing, such as waiting to contact people until they have enough material to care about preservation. 
• Including preservation education into larger training sessions that address other needs.
•  Identify four or five communities to support and identify the challenges and strategies to working each community.  
• Digital content creators have to understand that preservation is a necessary part of effective life-cycle management and the long-term value of content.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Curation Decision Form

Digital Curation Decision Form. Chris Erickson. Harold B. Lee Library. November 13, 2015.
Latest version is found here: Policies and Procedures
     This is the [former] version of our Digital Curation Decision Form (old version). The form is used by subject specialists (curators, subject librarians, or faculty responsible for collections) to determine

• what materials should be included in our Rosetta Digital Archive; 
• whether additional copies are needed, including copies on M-Discs; and 
• whether or not the digital collection is a preservation priority. 

Additional questions ask about access to the preservation copies; the preservation actions needed; and directions on content options if format migration is needed. The form was created to help subject specialists determine what should be preserved, even if they are unaware of digital preservation topics. In practice, we complete the form during an interview with new subject specialists. Documentation will be added when the final version is approved.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Curation as Journalism

Digital Curation as Journalism. Online Journalism 2. September 28, 2015.
     An interesting perspective:  

Curate – To gather, source, verify and redistribute information or social media elements to track an event. If done well, it can make sense of chaos and create a narrative of an event.  “I think curation has always been part of journalism; we just didn’t call it that.” – Andy Carvin.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Towards Sustainable Curation and Preservation: The SEAD Project’s Data Services Approach

Towards Sustainable Curation and Preservation: The SEAD Project’s Data Services Approach. James Myers, et al. IEEE International Conference on eScience. September 3, 2015. [PDF]
  This is a preview of a paper that will be presented at the conference on the Sustainable Environment: Actionable Data (SEAD). It details efforts to develop data management and curation services and to make those services available for active research groups to use. The introduction raises an apparent paradox: researchers face data management challenges yet curation practices that could help are used only after research work is completed (if at all). Adding data and metadata incrementally as the data are produced, the metadata could be used to help organize data during research.

If the system that preserved the data also generated citable persistent identifiers and dynamically updated the project’s web site with those citations, then completing the publication process would be in the best interest of the researcher. The discussions have revolved around two general areas that have been termed Active and Social Curation:

1. Active Curation: focus primarily on the activities of data producers and curators working during research projects to produce published data collections. 
2. Social Curation: explores how the  actions of the user community can be leveraged to provide further value. This could involve the ability of research groups to 
1. publish derived value-added data products, 
2. notify researchers when revisions or derived products appear, 
3. monitor the mix of file formats and metadata to help determine migration strategies

SEAD’s initial capabilities are provided by three primary interacting components:

1. Project Spaces: secure, self-managed storage and toolsto work with data resources
2. Virtual Archive: a service that manages publication of data collections from Project Spaces to long-term repositories
3. Researcher Network: personal and organizational profiles that can include literature and data publications.

SEAD has developed the ability to manage, curate, and publish to sustainability science projects data through hosted project spaces. This is a new option for projects that is more powerful than just using a shared file system and that is also more cost effective than a custom project solution.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Curation: think use, not preservation

Digital Curation: think use, not preservation. Jane Stevenson. Archives Hub blog. October 29, 2010.
     From a keynote presentation by Chris Rusbridge about the Blue Ribbon Task Force (BRTF) and  Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access. The most elegant technical solution is no good if it is not sustainable; digital preservation has to be a sustainable economic activity. The focus is on the economic and organizational problems. "It is not just about money; it requires building upon a value proposition, providing incentives to act and defining roles and responsibilities."

No one specifically ‘wants’ preservation; they want access to a resource.  Digital preservation represents a derived demand; it isn't easy to convince someone that they want preservation--you have to sell it on some other basis, such as selling others on the importance of providing use over time. Digital preservation is also ‘path dependent’, which means that your actions and decisions will change over time and they will be different as materials move through the life-cycle. Your actions today can also remove other options for all time.

Often the value of digital preservation is not recognized nor valued, so long-term preservation activities are often funded by short-term allocations. Usually it is not clear who has the responsibility for digital preservation so appropriate organization and oversight is essential for efficient ongoing preservation.

The task force reports that it is essential to:

1. show a compelling value proposition; 
2. provide clear incentives to preserve content; 
3. define preservation roles and responsibilities.

Often people think that digital preservation is expensive, but we must remember that it is in fact relatively cheap when compared to the preservation of physical archives that often require acid-free boxes, rows and rows of shelving, secure, controlled search rooms.  "So, if the cost is actually not prohibitive, and the technical know-how is there, then it seems imperative to address the organisational issues and to really hammer home the true value of preserving our digital data."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Curation is vital for cultural preservation

The Digital Divan: Dr Sean Pue explores ways to preserve Urdu poetry. Ali Raj. The Express Tribune. February 13, 2015.
     "Digital curation, a process by which digital assets are preserved and archived, is vital for cultural preservation...." 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Current Issues and Approaches to Curating Student Research Data

Current Issues and Approaches to Curating Student Research Data. Andrew Creamer. Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology. August 2015. [PDF May require subscription.]
     University libraries have collaborated with their colleges to archive and/or publish the students’ electronic theses and dissertations online. But there is little consistency in how they archive, curate and publish of the students’ research data and digital scholarship that underlies the ETDs. Most institutions have no policy on the caring for the ETD related data. Others have said that “Dissertation datasets represent ‘low-hanging fruit’ for universities who are developing institutional data collections” yet few have addressed the issues. At a recent conference, it was stated that curation of students’ ETD data can be seen as a scale model of the scholarly communication lifecycle and that these are valuable collections that universities should pursue, archive and make available.

One presenter described three organization-level digital curation challenges that libraries need to address:

1. people not knowing how to do the work,
2. not enough time or incentive for people to learn and
3. insufficient resources.

Academic library administrators have an unrealistic expectation that all digital responsibilities and expertise can be put into just one employee.  Aaron Collie at Michigan is working on a three-year strategic plan to create a "collaborative approach to digital curation that will put the policies, people and technologies in place to build organizational capacity." “I think digital preservation is a strategic direction that is too often operationalized as an individual responsibility and skill set.” 

There are important questions to be asked about how to best curate and describe student ETD data.

• Should there be more oversight over the documentation quality and quantity students provide with their datasets?
• Should these digital objects receive their own record and metadata?
• What are the best ways to show the relationships between these objects and the ETD?
• Can we make the same archival/preservation commitments to supplementary data files that we do for the pdf file of the ETD?

A study of 93 ETDs with related data in OSU’s repository:

• 45% were Excel files (30% of which had macros, charts and/or linked to other data),
• 22% were image files and
• 25% were document files.
• Of the remaining included text, database and/or statistical software files, of which
• 23% were code (and 15% of these executable files),
• 12% of the files were metadata.
• 30% were unknown, un-operable and/or obsolete; and
• 3% of the ETDs were missing data files from what was listed among their manifests.

The consensus was that student data collections are worth pursuing and have much value for the public and research enterprise. Libraries interested in this data need to be realize that the content may be more important than previously thought.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Advocacy and Born-Digital Archives

Advocacy and Born-Digital Archives.  Mike Shallcross.  Bentley Historical Library. August 13, 2015.
     What is it that you do, anyway? When talking to library/university administrators and outside financial donors, we need to adjust how we explain what we do with digital archives. They may not need to know all the little details, but they really need to know it is that we do and why it's important. If we can't do that then getting resources and being relevant will be an uphill battle. Advocacy is an integral archives as we seek to show the value and get support.  We have to represent our work in a way that others can really understand.

We have to make a case, and the way that we present it may be different for donors and for administrators. "Successful advocacy should involve and inspire the audience so that they understand how and why they might benefit from our work." Show the added value of the archives to the people and the organization, show the benefits in a quantitative way. The value may be:

• Helping researchers understand the collections and improve the way they use them
• Ensure that content [which are valuable assets] can still be accessed in the future
• Protecting personal information, intellectual rights, institutional policies, legal requirements, and donor agreements.
• Developing resources for researchers to use and reuse materials

We must show the benefits of this if we want others to commit resources to the archives. Highlight innovations, achievements, and recognitions.

"Our work in “digital curation” encompasses traditional archival functions—the process of selecting materials of high research or intrinsic value and making them accessible to researchers—but also involves additional steps to ensure the integrity and authenticity of content."

[It also helps to show the value in money: money earned, money saved, money that can be put elsewhere.]

Digital Preservation Matters.

Risk Assessment as a Tool in the Conservation of Software-based Artworks

Risk Assessment as a Tool in the Conservation of Software-based Artworks. Patricia Falcao.
   The article looks at the use of risk assessment methodologies to identify and evaluate vulnerabilities of software-based artworks. Software-based art is dependent on technology. Two consequences of this:
1. Because electronic equipment is usually mass-produced, there are very few cases where one individual device is essential for the artwork.
2. On the other hand, when the equipment is no longer commercially available it becomes very difficult to replace any of its elements.
A sculpture conservator may be able to re-make a missing element for a sculpture by using the same or similar materials but a time-based media conservator cannot always re-make obsolete electronics. A particular artwork may use custom-made software. "Any software, in turn, usually requires a specific operating system. All the programs, from the firmware to the operating system, must run properly. All settings, plug-ins, and codecs must be in place. Without all of these, there is no artwork."

This means that each artwork is a custom-made system; the components may vary with each iteration of the work and as technology changes. A conservator understand "how these components are used in the particular system and how they influence the risks and options for long-term preservation." With the conservation of contemporary art,  obsolescence only affects an artwork once something stops working. But the effect of obsolescence will increase over time. 

Software-based artworks are similar to time-based media, bu they are more vulnerable to those risks because:

1. Systems are customized for each artwork.
2. Systems are easily changed, so that connecting a archival computer to the Internet could cause it to run an automatic update that causes the file will no longer run. 
3. The technical environment is rapidly changing.

The degree of significance can be evaluated by

1. Provenance 
2. Rarity or representativeness 
3. Condition or completeness 
4. Interpretive capacity

A procedure for the acquisition of software-based artworks being developed is composed of simple actions during acquisition that can diminish the impact of obsolescence in the medium-term. It is important to discuss the artwork, technology, and possible preservation measures with the artists and technical staff.  The conservator should identify and define:

1. The display or presentation parameters 
2. What can or cannot be changed, and within what limits. 
3. Identify obsolescent elements and create a plan for recovery.  
4. How the artist wants the artwork preserved. Identify core elements and migration strategy.  
5. Understand the system (hardware, software). Test the system with the artist and staff. 

Over the lifetime of the artwork,

1. Document the system and any changes over time  
2. Prevent changes such as automatic updates
3. Monitor obsolescence issues with the components of the work.  
4. Re-evaluate preservation needs regularly. 

Some steps that can be taken to reduce the failure and obsolescence

1. Make clones of the computer’s hard drive immediately upon acquisition. 
2. Create an exhibition copy of the system, possibly with the artist and staff. 
3. Gather operation manuals, service manuals, and hardware specifications. 
4. Save the software versions, source code, libraries, and programming tools necessary to read project files. 

For long term preservation,

1. Continue to implement the preservation strategies identified.
2. Develop clear procedures for the acquisition of software-based artworks. 
3. Identify software tools useful for preservation. 
4. Test recovery strategies and confirm results over time. 
5. Develop relationships with experts in the fields required for preservation. 

Software-based preservation will require more than just the conservator. It will also require help from the technology field and many tools.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Collection, Curation, Citation at Source: Publication@Source 10 Years On

Collection, Curation, Citation at Source: Publication@Source 10 Years On. Jeremy G. Frey, et al. International Journal of Digital Curation. Vol 10, No 2, 2015.
   The article describes a scholarly knowledge cycle which says the accumulation of knowledge is based on the continuing use and reuse of data and information. Collection, curation, and citation are three processes intrinsic to the workflows of the cycle. The currency of collection, curation, and citation is metadata."Policies should recognize that small amounts of adequately characterized, focused data are preferable to large amounts of inadequately defined and controlled data stored in a random repository." The increasing size of data-sets and the growing risk of loss through catastrophic failure (such as a disk failure) has led to researchers to use cloud storage, perhaps too uncritically so.

The responsibilities of researchers for meeting the requirements of sound governance and ensuring the quality of their work have become more apparent. The article places the responsibility for curation firmly with the originator of the data. "Researchers should organize their data and preserve it with semantically rich metadata, captured at source, to provide short- and long-term advantages for sharing and collaboration."  Principal Investigators, as custodians, are particularly responsible for clinical data management and security (though curation and preservation activities exist in other research roles). "Curators usually attempt to add links to the original publications or source databases, but in practice, provenance records are often absent, incomplete or ad hoc, often despite curators’ best efforts. Also, manually managed provenance records are at higher risk of human error or falsification." There is a pressing need for training and education to encourage researchers to curate the data as they collect it at source.

"All science is strongly dependent on preserving, maintaining, and adding value to the research record, including the data, both raw and derived, generated during the scientific process. This statement leads naturally to the assertion that all science is strongly dependent on curation."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Why You Really Need a Digital Asset Management Workflow

Why You Really Need a Digital Asset Management Workflow. Diane Haddad. Blog. May 11, 2015.
Importance of managing your growing digital image collection. Set up a system that fits your needs and accomplishes the basic steps of Digital Photo Management. Digital Asset Management Workflow:
1. Capture images
2. Import images to a single working area
3. Rename image files from the device-generated names to follow standard naming convention
4. Backup images
5. Add appropriate metadata
6. Archive content in a permanent, off-site location
Follow the established workflow. The goal is long-term archiving and access.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Curation Tools & Techniques

Digital Curation Tools & Techniques. Nancy McGovern.  Webinar: Metropolitan New York Library Council. April 2015.
This is a recording of Nancy's excellent webinar and it goes along with the management tools website.  As organizations build sustainable digital preservation programs, they work toward being a trusted digital repository by following emerging digital preservation standards. There are now a number of tools to help with technical issues and now some management tools to help with organizational issues. The Digital Preservation Management workshop launched a set of management tools and techniques.

This webinar looks at using a set of digital curation and preservation principles to describe a  framework for developing a digital preservation program. The organizational aspects of digital preservation is more challenging than the technological issues. This helps people to work with tools and techniques, develop good practices, emphasize the organizational aspects and apply the 5 stages:

1. Acknowledge: understanding that digital preservation is a local concern
2. Act: initiating digital preservation projects
3. Consolidate: segueing from project to basic program
4. Institutionalize: rationalizing local efforts to establish a comprehensive program
5. Externalize: embracing inter-institutional collaboration and dependency

Each tool and technique is built on the DPM model, the three-legged stool (Organizational Leg, Technological Leg, and Resources Framework) with the five stages of development for a sustainable digital preservation program. There is a tool or technique to help organizations in each of these areas:

1. Principles: Adopt standards-based principles 
2. Policy: Develop a high-level policy framework 
3. Scope: Complete a digital content review to define program scope
4. Workflow: Document workflows to improve and automate 
5. Preparedness: Extend disaster preparedness to include digital
6. Self-assessment: Engage in self-assessment to gauge progress

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preparing the Workforce for Digital Curation

Preparing the Workforce for Digital Curation. The National Academies Press. 2015.  
This 105 page report focuses on the need for digital curation education and training in order to provide meaningful use of digital information, now and in the future.  [PDF version] This study defines digital curation as: “The active management and enhancement of digital information assets for current and future use.” Digital curation is more than preserving the digital information in secure storage because curation may add value to digital information and increase its utility.

Digital curation is similar to traditional curation. "Regardless of whether a collection is physical or digital, a curator must appraise its value and relevance to the community of potential users; determine the need for preservation; document provenance and authenticity; describe, register, and catalog its content; arrange for long-term storage and preservation; and provide a means for access and use." But it also has many new challenges: the quantities of material to be curated, the need for active and ongoing management, continually changing uses and technology, and the diversity of organizational contexts in which curation occurs. It is more than simply collecting and storing data and information. Active management denotes planned, systematic, coordinated, purposeful, and directed actions that make digital information fit for a purpose. And to ensure that digital information will remain discoverable, accessible, and useable for as long as users have a need and a right to use it.

A new pattern of data usage puts a greater emphasis on the standardization of digital curation practices so that the data can be shared more easily.  Archiving digital data requires a more active management approach, and a more collaborative partnership between producers, archivists and users.

The Loss of Cultural Heritage Through Deterioration of Records and Technological Change: Sound recordings are a striking example of cultural heritage data at high risk of loss. These include music, oral histories, and radio broadcasts preserved in a wide variety of formats and media.

Some benefits of digital curation include:

• Increased collaboration and cost sharing;
• Greater use of data in teaching and research training;
• New opportunities and uses for data, including data mining;
• Creation of a more complete record of research;
• Creation of new areas of research, new industries, or new support services.

Some principal conclusions:

1. Significant opportunities exist to embed digital curation deeply into an organization’s practices to reduce costs and increase benefits. Digital curation will be increasingly in demand across many sectors of society.
2. Digital curation can be advanced by various organizations that can serve as leaders, models, and sources of good curation practices, and build trust by preserving assets.
3. Some barriers to digital curation include: lack of sharing of resources and insufficient resources.
4. There is a need to identify, segregate, and measure the costs of curation tasks in scientific research and business processes.
5. Standards and existing practices vary greatly, which can lead to a lack of coordination across different sectors. This in turn can lead to limited adoption of consistent standards for digital curation and fragmented dissemination of good practices.
6. Automation of at least some digital curation tasks is desirable
7. The knowledge and skills required of those engaged in digital curation are dynamic and highly interdisciplinary.

Some recommendations include:

1. Research communities, educational institutions, and others should work together to develop and adopt digital curation standards and good practices.
2. Work to identify and predict the costs associated with digital curation.
3. Organizations should identify, explain, and measure the benefits derived from digital curation

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Curation and Doctoral Research: Current Practice

Digital Curation and Doctoral Research: Current Practice. Daisy Abbott. International Journal of Digital Curation. 10 February 2015.[PDF]
More doctoral students are engaging in research data creation, processing, use, management, and preservation activities (digital duration) than ever before. Digital curation is an intrinsic part of the skills that students are expected to acquire.

Training in research skills and techniques is the key element in the development of a research student. The integration of digital curation into expected research skills is essential. Doctoral supervisors "should discuss and review research data management annually, addressing issues of the capture, management, integrity, confidentiality, security, selection, preservation and disposal, commercialization, costs, sharing and publication of research data and the production of descriptive metadata to aid discovery and re-use when relevant." Those supervisors may not necessarily have those skills themselves. And there is a gap in the literature about why and how to manage, curate, and preserve digital data as part of a PhD program.

While both doctoral students and supervisors can benefit from traditional resources on the topic, the majority of guidance on digital curation takes the form of online resources and training programs. In a survey,

• over 50% of PhD holders consider long-term preservation to be extremely important. 
• under 40% of students consider long-term preservation to be extremely important.
• 90% of doctoral students and supervisors consider digital curation to be moderately to extremely important. 
• Yet 74% of respondents stated that they had limited or no skills in digital curation and only 10% stated that they were “fairly skilled” or “expert”. 

And generally researchers were not are of the digital curation support services that are available. The relatively recent emphasis on digital curation in research nature of or the processes, present problems for supervisors. Developing the appropriate skills and knowledge to create, access, use, manage, store and preserve data should therefore be considered an important part of any researcher’s development. Efforts should be taken to

• Ensure practical digital curation is understood
• Encourage responsibility for digital curation activities in institutional support structures
• Increase the discoverability and availability of digital curation support services

 Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital curation and quality standards for memory institutions: PREFORMA research project

Digital curation and quality standards for memory institutions: PREFORMA research project. Antonella Fresa, Börje Justrell, Claudio Prandoni. Archival Science. 25 Mar 2015.  [PDF]

Memory institutions are facing increasing content for long-term preservation. The intention of PREFORMA project (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is to establish a long-term sustainable ecosystem around a range of practical tools with the stakeholders. According to the recent European Cultural Heritages study, 

• 3 % of institutions studied have a written digital preservation strategy (from 44 % for national libraries to 12–25 % for museums)
• About a third of the institutions are included in a national preservation strategy
• 40 % of national libraries say there is no national digital preservation strategy
• 30 % of institutions are included in a national digital preservation infrastructure

There are barriers for digitization and curation, such as: 

• cost of digitization
• high costs of digital preservation, due to the use of separate solutions implemented by each memory institution
• cultural content is complex

Digital preservation is defined by the Digital Preservation Europe project as ‘‘a set of activities required to make sure digital objects can be located, rendered, used and understood in the future’’. To be used meaningfully in the future, digital objects should be preserved in a context that makes them usable and understandable for future users. The  preservation  of  digital  information  is  an  ongoing  action,  to  be periodically revised, in order to update data sets and metadata formats.

In the area of creation and appraisal of digital objects, there are three identifiable
major work areas:

1. Standardisation of the communication between the producer and the archive;
2. Development of tools supporting generation and transformation of metadata;
3. Development of tools for automated or semi-automated appraisal of data.

Important aspects for digital preservation during ingest are:

1. File format
2. Authenticity, integrity and provenance  data 
3. Completeness of metadata  accompanying   digital  objects  
4. Transformation of objects that may be necessary 

The PREFORMA activities intend to allow institutions control  over  the  technical  properties  of  preservation  files through an open-source conformance checker and creating an ecosystem around the implementation for specific file formats. The first activity is to develop an open-source toolset for conformance checking of digital  files. The second activity is to establish a network of common interest in order to gain control over the technical properties of preservation files

Preservation and access to cultural heritage materials participates in movement towards ‘‘unlocking the full value of scientific data’’. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Challenges with an ETD Collection: A Case Study at Texas Tech University

Digital Preservation Challenges with an ETD Collection — A Case Study at Texas Tech University. Joy M. Perrina, Heidi M. Winkler, Le Yanga. The Journal of Academic Librarianship. January, 2015.
The potential risk of loss seems distant and theoretical until it actually happens. The "potential impact of that loss increases exponentially" for a university when the loss is part of the research output. This excellent article looks at a case study of the challenges one university library encountered with its electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs).  Many institutions have been changing from publishing paper theses and dissertations to accepting electronic copies. One of the challenges that has not received as much attention is that of preserving these electronic documents for the long term.  The electronic documents require more hands-on curation.

Texas Tech University encountered difficulties with preserving their ETD collection. They hope the lessons learned from these data losses will help other organizations looking to preserve ETDs and other types of digital files and collections. Some of the losses were:

1. Loss of metadata edits. Corrupted database and corrupted IT backups required a rebuild of the database, but the entered metadata was lost.
2. Loss of administrative metadata-embargo periods. The ETD-db files imported into DSpace did not include the embargoed files. Plans were not documented and personnel changed before the problem was discovered. Some items were found accidentally on a personal drive years later.
3. Loss of scanned files. The scanning server was also the location to store files after scanning. Human error beyond the backup window resulted in the deletion of over a thousand scanned ETDs, which were eventually recovered.
4. Failure of policies: loss of embargo statuses changes. The embargo statement recorded in the ETD management system did not match what was published in DSpace.

The library started on real digital preservation for the ETD collection. Funds were set aside to increase the storage of the archive space and provide a second copy of the archived files. A digital resources unit was created to handle the digital files which finally brought the entire digital workflow, from scanning to preservation, under one supervisor. The library joined DPN in hopes that it would yield a level of preservation far beyond what the university would be able to accomplish alone. The clean-up of the problems has been difficult and will take years to accomplish. Lessons learned:

1. Systems designed for managing or publishing documents are not preservation solutions
2. System backups are not reliable enough to act as a preservation copy. Institutions must make digital preservation plans beyond backups
3. Organizations with valuable digital assets should invest in their items to store them outside of a display system only. 
4. Multiple copies of digital items must reside on different servers in order to guarantee that files will not be accidentally deleted or lost through technical difficulties. 
5. All metadata, including administrative data, should be preserved outside of the display system. The metadata is a crucial part of the digital item.
6. Digital items are collections of files and metadata.
7. Maintaining written procedures and documentation for all aspects of digital collections is vital.
8. The success of digital preservation will require collaboration between curators and the IT people who maintain the software and hardware, and consistent terminology (e.g. archived).

 "Even though this case study has primarily been a description of local issues, the grander lessons gleaned from these crises are not specific to this institution. Librarians are learning and re-learning every day that digital collections cannot be managed in the same fashion as their physical counterparts. These digital collections require more active care over the course of their lifecycles and may require assistance from those outside the traditional library sphere...."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Falling Though the Cracks: Digital Preservation and Institutional Failures

Falling Though the Cracks: Digital Preservation and Institutional Failures. Jerome McDonough. CNI.  December 2014. Video.
A video that explores whether libraries, archives and museums are designed in a way to really provide long-term access to cultural heritage materials. Why are we doing digital preservation, how to do it better, how do we do librarianship better.  Looks at OAIS and the complexities of preserving cultural materials. Need to train people to have broader perspectives across different fields, such as librarians, archivists, and curators.

Digital Preservation Matters.