Arctic World Archive receives more world treasures

Arctic World Archive receives more world treasures. Press release. 21. February 2019.
     Institutions and companies from around the world, including Utah Valley University, have deposited their digital content in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway.  The Archive is a repository for world memory where the data will last for centuries.  The Archive is a collaboration between Piql, digital preservation specialists, and Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK), a state-owned Norwegian mining company based on Svalbard with vast experience and resources to build and maintain mountain vaults.

The top 10 items of cultural heritage, as nominated by the public was also stored away for the future. These items include famous religious texts, paintings, architectural designs, science breakthroughs and popular contemporary music. 


See also:

• Vintage Cloud and Piql join forces for high quality service. 04 December 2018.
• Digital Preservation with Film. 2015.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Texas Digital Library Digital Preservation Services

Texas Digital Library Digital Preservation Services. Press release. Texas Digital Library, 5 March 2019. [PDF]
     The organization now offers Digital Preservation Services to its members to help Texas cultural heritage and scholarship stewards provide access for the long term through direct consulting, training, and workflow support that includes the right combination of technologies for your unique content needs. The content can be stored in multiple geographically-dispersed locations with fixity checking with Chronopolis and Amazon through the DuraCloud interface.

Digital Preservation Matters.

3 Principles for Selecting a Digital Preservation Solution

3 Principles for Selecting a Digital Preservation Solution. Daniel Greenberg. Ex Libris. November 29, 2018.
   This post was in honor of World Digital Preservation Day and lists some important elements to remember when reviewing digital preservation systems:

1. Interoperability different types of data and integrating with other systems

• Support common protocols for harvesting, publishing and searching, e.g. Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) and SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL).
• Ingest content with multiple methods and structures; e.g., BagIt, METS, CSV, and XML.
• Providing well-documented external APIs
• Integrating with other information systems

2. Follow Industry Standards, particularly standard metadata schemas and communication protocols. Benefits of doing this:

• Interoperability between new and existing services and applications.
• Compliance with policies and regulations.
• Introduction of innovative features.
• Enable a robust exit strategy, in case the vendor goes out of business.

3. Scalability:

• Architectural scalability: Start small and grow big. Ability to expand the throughput over time without compromising performance.
• Operational scalability: Ability to customize the system to the institutions’ needs.
• Informational scalability: Keep up with latest strategies, practices, tools and policies by an active user community.
• Organizational scalability: Administer multiple institutions with a single installation; support a flexible consortium model.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Ex Libris joins the Open Preservation Foundation

Ex Libris joins the Open Preservation Foundation. Becky McGuinness. Press Release. Open Preservation Foundation. June 1, 2017.
     The Open Preservation Foundation announced that Ex Libris is its newest charter member. "Ex Libris’ Rosetta is an end-to-end digital asset management and preservation solution for libraries, archives, museums and other institutions, enabling institutions to safely and securely collect, manage, publish, deliver, and ensure longevity for digital information of many different types. With Rosetta’s unique content preservation planning module and its Format Library knowledge base, shared by the entire Rosetta community, institutions can identify format risks, evaluate mitigation alternatives, and select the best preservation actions."  "Rosetta reflects Ex Libris involvement in industry standards and commitment to extensibility and open architecture."  "Rosetta itself is based on an open architecture that allows customers to easily use Rosetta with external tools and plugins such as JHOVE and other open-source software. By supporting OPF, we can further improve open-source tools for the benefit of all."
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Rosetta Knowledge Center

Rosetta Knowledge Center. Ex Libris. April 17, 2017.
     One of the things that I like about Rosetta, is the Ex Libris commitment to an open system. While the software may be proprietary, the essential content is open. The permanent objects and metadata are stored openly, so that they can be accessed or managed outside of the Rosetta software.

Another area that Ex Libris has opened is their Knowledge Center. This is very helpful in training new employees, learning new things about the software, or refreshing my memory. The open website includes:

• Product Documentation
• Training: Learn new skills with tutorials, recorded training and other materials
• Release Notes about the features and capabilities of each product version
• Implementation Guides that explain the methodology and requirements
• Knowledge Articles providing answers to help answer questions

Digital Preservation Matters.

Procuring Digital Preservation: A Briefing

Procuring Digital Preservation: A Briefing.  Digital Preservation Coalition. 21 March 2017.
     Selecting and deploying solutions is especially challenging where the processes are new, or where the available resources are stretched, moving from project to ‘business as usual’ can be hard. This may be the case with digital preservation, but new digital preservation tools, services, and suppliers are emerging rapidly. This requires digital preservation staff make confident choices between different products. The increasing number and type of choices can lead to‘information overload,’ and delay the already complicated process. Even organisations that "properly understand their digital preservation needs can be frustrated in solving them, while solution providers have to meet impractical and at times unfeasible expectations."

The Digital Preservation Coalition hosted a briefing day to clarify requirements help find solutions. The presentations:

• examine requirements from the perspective of the developer and the collection owner
• discuss procedures for acquiring a preservation solution
• discuss case studies and good practices for documenting requirements
• examine current proprietary and open source solutions for digital preservation
• Allow vendors to explain their own requirements 

Slides from several sessions are available:

• 'From process to solution: What I have learned' with Marc Fresko
• 'Internal Advocacy: persuading a complex organisation it needs Digital Preservation' with Chris Fryer, Parliamentary Archives
• 'Cloudy horizons: testing different solutions' with Lee Hibberd, National Library of Scotland
• 'From requirements to service and thereafter' with Claire Tunstall, Unilever
• 'DIY DP' with Neil Jefferies, University of Oxford Bodleian Libraries
• Service Providers’ case studies: 'What makes a supplier happy?' with Arkivum and Preservica

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation Network - 2016

Digital Preservation Network - 2016. Chris Erickson. December 5, 2016.
     An overview of  the reason for DPN. Academic institutions require that their scholarly histories, heritage and research remain part of the academic record. This record needs to continue beyond the life spans of individuals, technological systems, and organizations. The loss of academic collections that are part of these institutions could be catastrophic. These collections, which include oral history collections, born digital artworks, historic journals, theses, dissertations, media and fragile digitizations of ancient documents and antiquities are irreplaceable resources.

DPN is structured to preserve the stored content by using diverse geographic, technical, and institutional environments. The preservation process consists of:

1. Content is deposited into the system through an Ingest Node, which are preservation repositories themselves; 
2. Content is replicated to at least two other Replicating Nodes and stored in different types of repository infrastructures; 
3. Content is checked by bit auditing and repair services to prevent change or loss; 
4. Changed or corrupted content is restored by DPN; 
5. As Nodes enter and leave DPN, preserved content is redistributed to maintain the continuity of preservation services into the far-future.

The Ingest Node that we are using is through DuraCloud.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Implementing Automatic Digital Preservation for a Mass Digitization Workflow

Implementing Automatic Digital Preservation for a Mass Digitization Workflow. Henrike Berthold, Andreas Romeyke, Jörg Sachse.  Short paper, iPres 2016.  (Proceedings p. 54-56 / PDF p. 28-29). 

     This short paper describes their preservation workflow for digitized documents and the in-house mass digitization workflow, based on the Kitodo software, and the three major challenges encountered.

1. validating and checking the target file format and the constraints to it,
2. handling updates of d content already submitted to the preservation system, 
3. checking the integrity of all archived data in an affordable way

They produce several million scans a year and preserve these digital documents in their Rosetta based archive which is complemented by a submission application for pre-ingest processing, an access application that prepares the preserved master data for reuse, and a storage layer that ensures the existence of three redundant copies of the data in the permanent storage and a backup of data in the processing and operational storage. They have customized Rosetta operations with plugins they developed.  In the workflow, the data format of each file is identified, validated and technical metadata are extracted. AIPS are added to the permanent storage (disk and LTO tapes). The storage layer, which uses hierarchical storage management, creates two more copies and manages them.

To ensure robustness, only single page, uncompressed TIFF files are accepted. They use the open-source tool checkit-tiff to check files against a specified configuration. To deal with AIP updates, files can be submitted multiple times: the first time is an ingest, all transfers after that are updates. Rosetta ingest functions can add, delete, or replace a file. Rosetta can also manage multiple versions of an AIP, so older versions of digital objects remain accessible for users.

They manage three copies of the data, which totals 120 TBs. An integrity check of all digital documents, including the three copies, is not feasible due to the time that is required to read all data from tape storage and check them. So to get reliable results without checking all data in the archive they use two different methods:

• Sample Method Integrity 1% sample of archival copies is checked yearly 
• Specified fixed bit pattern workflow that is checked quarterly.

Their current challenges are in developing new media types (digital video, audio, photographs and pdf documents), unified pre-ingest processing, and automation of processes (e.g. to perform tests of new software versions).

Digital Preservation Matters.

German hbz Consortium Selects Ex Libris Rosetta Digital Asset Management and Preservation Solution

German hbz Consortium Selects Ex Libris  Rosetta Digital Asset Management and Preservation Solution. Press Release. ProQuest. 29 November 2016.
     Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes Nordrhein‑Westfalen has chosen the Ex Libris Rosetta digital asset management and preservation solution. There are more than 40 member institutions that will be able to deposit digital collections in the central Rosetta system. “Our preservation and management plans across the entire North-Rhine Westphalia region include both artifacts and modern research output. With Rosetta, we will be able preserve a wide range of data and manage digital assets on both the consortium and institutional level. Rosetta meets our current and long-term needs.” 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation with the Islandora Framework at Qatar National Library

Digital Preservation with the Islandora Framework at Qatar National Library. Armin Straube, Arif Shaon, Mohammed Abo Ouda. Poster, iPres 2016.  (Proceedings p. 270-271 / PDF p. 136).
     This poster outlines how Qatar National Library is creating a digital preservation solution. Their preservation strategy is to build a trustworthy digital repository based on established digital preservation and certification. The guiding principles that serve as benchmarks for their digital preservation efforts and which will inform its decision making process:

• Accessibility: permanent accessibility and usability
• Integrity: verify checksums, storage redundancies, monitoring and managing storage hardware.
• Persistent identifiers
• Metadata: capture technical metadata and record in PREMIS
• Preservation planning and risk assessment
• Standards compliance and trustworthiness
• Development and research via collaboration

The digital repository is based on Islandora integrated with Fedora Commons along with different preservation functions to be developed as Drupal modules. The repository stores image objects (digitized books, maps, photos etc.) in both tiff and jpeg2000 formats; audio-visual collections in mp4 and wav; and web archives in warc format from Heritrix.  The library will develop a file format policy that will enhance the basis of its risk assessment.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Exit Strategies and Techniques for Cloud-based Preservation Services

Exit Strategies and Techniques for Cloud-based Preservation Services. Matthew Addis. iPres 2016. (Proceedings p. 276-7/ PDF p. 139).

   This poster discusses the need for an exit strategy for when organisations that use cloud-based preservation services, and understanding what is involved in migrating to or from a cloud-hosted service. It specifically looks at Arkivum and Archivematica. Some of the topics include Contractual agreements, data escrow, open source software licensing, use of independent third-party providers, and tested processes and procedures in order to mitigate risks. The top two issues are

1. the need for an exit strategy when using a cloud preservation service, and
2. the need to establish trust and perform checks on the quality of the service

It mentions that “full support for migrating between preservation environments has yet to be implemented in a production preservation service.” The approach used in the poster includes:

• Data escrow
• Log files of the software versions and updates
• Ability to export database and configuration
• Ability to test a migration

 It is important to remember in a migration test that “production pipelines may contain substantial amounts of data and hence doing actual migration tests of the whole service on a regular basis will typically not be practical”.  “Hosted preservation services offer many benefits but their adoption can be hampered by concerns over vendor lock-in and inability to migrate away from the service, i.e. lack of exit-plan.“   

Digital Preservation Matters.

Victoria University of Wellington Selects Ex Libris Rosetta for Preserving and Managing Digital Assets

Victoria University of Wellington Selects Ex Libris Rosetta for Preserving and Managing Digital Assets. Press release. August 2016.
     "Victoria University of Wellington has selected Rosetta as its digital preservation and asset management solution. The Victoria University Library serves as the custodian of over 15,000 digitized historical cultural works, part of the New Zealand Electronic Text Collection, and over 11,000 born-digital theses and research projects in institutional repositories, including several other smaller digital collections. Rosetta will be a key element of the Library’s digital assets management and preservation processes and will enable researchers in any location to read or view the digital objects in the Library's extensive collections."

"Adopting Rosetta will enable us to manage, maintain, and preserve these collections in the long term, as well as grow them in the future. As our collections increase, standards of digital preservation and description become more vital to the continuity and discovery of materials for future knowledge creation. It’s not just about the students and researchers of today. It’s about the students and researchers of the future, too.”

Digital Preservation Matters.

TRAC Certified Long-term Digital Preservation: DuraCloud and Chronopolis for Institutional Treasures

TRAC Certified Long-term Digital Preservation: DuraCloud and Chronopolis for Institutional Treasures. Website. 1 September 2016.
     "An institution’s identity is often formed by what it saves for current and future access. Digital collections curated by the academy can include research data, images, texts, reports, artworks, books, and historic documents help define an academic institution’s identity."

DuraSpace and the Chronopolis service at the University of California at San Diego’s  announce the DuraCloud Enterprise Chronopolis subscription plan for digital preservation. It stores digital content in Amazon and in the Chronopolis network. It provides geographic replication and synchronization of content between three storage locations, and has content integrity monitoring in a dark storage option. Plan options are a combination of Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, and SDSC.

Pricing and Plan details
DuraCloud Preservation                    Subscription Fee: $1,175 Storage: $700/TB
DuraCloud Preservation Plus             Subscription Fee: $1,175 Storage: $825/TB
DuraCloud Enterprise                        Subscription Fee: $5,250 Storage: $500/TB
DuraCloud Enterprise Plus                Subscription Fee: $5,250 Storage: $625/TB
DuraCloud Enterprise Plus                Subscription Fee: $5,550 Storage: $1,200/TB (Option 2)
DuraCloud Enterprise Chronopolis    Subscription Fee: $2,750 Storage: $500/TB (Ingest and retrieval fees extra)

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Center for Jewish History Adopts Rosetta for Digital Preservation and Asset Management

The Center for Jewish History Adopts Rosetta for Digital Preservation and Asset Management. Ex Libris. Press Release. May 12, 2016.
     After a thorough search process, the Center for Jewish History selected the Ex Libris Rosetta digital asset management and preservation solution. They wanted a system to handle their comprehensive list of requirements for both long‑term digital preservation and robust management of digital assets, including the ability to interface with their other systems.

The Center’s partners are American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.  The collections include more than five miles of archival documents, over 500,000 volumes, and thousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings, films, and photographs.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Looking Across the Digital Preservation Landscape

Looking Across the Digital Preservation Landscape. Margaret Heller. ACRL TechConnect Blog. April 25, 2016.
     "When it comes to digital preservation, everyone agrees that a little bit is better than nothing." The article cited refers to two presentations from Code4Lib 2016, “Can’t Wait for Perfect: Implementing “Good Enough” Digital Preservation” by Shira Peltzman and Alice Sara Prael, and “Digital Preservation 101, or, How to Keep Bits for Centuries” by Julie Swierczek. This article mentions two major items about digital preservation:

1. Digital preservation doesn’t have to be hard, but it does have to be intentional.
2. Digital preservation requires institutional commitment. 

Understanding all the basic issues and what your options are can be daunting. They had a committee that started examining born digital materials, but expanded the  focus to all digital materials because it made it easier to test their ideas. Some of the tasks they accomplished included: created a rough inventory of digital materials, a workflow manual, and secured networked storage  to replace all removable hard drives used for backups. "While backups aren’t exactly digital preservation, we wanted to at the very least secure the backups we did have". The inventory and workflow manual are living documents and are useful for identifying gaps in the processes.

They also looked at the end-to-end systems available for digital preservation, such as Preservica, ArchivesDirect, and Rosetta. Migrating from one system to another if you change your mind may involve some very difficult processes, so people may tend to stay with providers.  Another option is to join a preservation network, such as Digital Preservation Network (DPN) or APTrust, that have the larger preservation goal ensuring long-term access to material even if the owning institution disappears.

Sustainable Financing for many is the crux of the digital preservation problem. "It’s possible to do a sort of ok job with digital preservation for nothing or very cheap, but to ensure long term preservation requires institutional commitment for the long haul, just as any library collection requires."

Digital Preservation is receiving more attention digital preservation lately and hopefully more libraries will see this as a priority.

Digital Preservation Matters.

File identification ...let's talk about the workflows

File identification ...let's talk about the workflows. Jenny Mitcham. Digital Archiving at the University of York. 27 November 2015.
     When adding files to a digital archive, an important questions is "What file formats have we got here?" Knowing this can:

• determine the right software to open the file and view the contents 
• start the conversation with the data provider about what formats are best to use for archiving
• discuss the risks on the format and define a migration pathway for preservation and/or access

There are many tools for working with formats; each tool has strengths and weaknesses. Defining a workflow can help determine how best to use these tools, how to interact with them, or if manual steps should be taken instead. File identification tools are often incorporated into digital preservation systems that may determine the workflow in using the tools. Additional workflow questions around format tools include:

• what should happen if ingested data can't be identified?  
• should the curator/digital archivist be able to over-ride file identifications?
• what should happen if there is more than one possible identification for a file?
• is there a sustainable manual identification process if tools cannot identify a file? 
• how to contribute to file format registries such as PRONOM
• is the digital preservation system configurable enough to resolve these questions? 

Their Archivematica development work is focusing in the first instance on allowing the digital curator to see a report of the files that are not identified in order to understand the problem.

[Our Rosetta system has a format library that handles these questions, as well as a user driven Format Working Group that helps resolve questions and interacts with PRONOM if there are questions, changes or new additions. - Chris]

Digital Preservation Matters.

Archives and SharePoint

Archives and SharePoint. Heather Emily Roberts. HerArchivist. March 8, 2016.
     Post that looks at "Is SharePoint (or other flexible cloud-based ERMS software) suitable for digital repositories of archives?"  Some pros and cons of using SharePoint as a digital repository:
Pros:

• Can lock documents against editing
• Tells you when documents were last accessed and by whom

Cons:

• Will not serve long-term needs of accessibility or use of records
• Will not support migration requirements of archival records
• Will not guarantee integrity of archival records during software updates
• Does not conform to OAIS model
• Archive preservation practices are not standard

The main recommendation if using SharePoint as an Electronic Record Management System is to export archival documents to an OAIS compliant system (some are listed).
[We use our harvest tool to import permanent SharePoint records into our Rosetta system - Chris.]

Related posts:

• New Sources and Storage Options For Rosetta
• OAI-PMH harvesting from SharePoint

 

Digital Preservation Matters.

New digital preservation solution from Arkivum

New digital preservation solution from Arkivum, shaped to grow with your data. Nik Stanbridge. Arkivum Press release. January 21, 2016.
     Arkivum is launching a new cloud-based digital preservation and archiving service with Artefactual Systems Inc. of Vancouver. "Arkivum/Perpetua is a cost-effective, comprehensive, fully hosted and managed digital preservation and public access solution that uses Archivematica and AtoM (Access to Memory) services in the cloud."

In a survey of archivists and data curators, 87% said "file format preservation and data integrity were important elements to their digital preservation workflow. And a third of respondents stated that they would be using a cloud-based solution for their digital preservation data."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Figshare Joins the Digital Preservation Network

Figshare Joins the Digital Preservation Network to ensure survival, ownership and management of research data into the future. Carol Minton Morris.  DuraSpace. January 20, 2016.
     "Figshare, a platform that supports the management of research content, is the first research data repository to join the DPN Federation". The research data from Figshare will be deposited in DPN through the DuraSpace DuraCloud Vault node and this will provide long-term access to scholarly resources.

Digital Preservation Matters.

OhioLINK Adopts Ex Libris Rosetta for Digital Preservation

OhioLINK Adopts Ex Libris Rosetta for Digital Preservation. Ex Libris. Press release. December 21, 2015.
     OhioLINK has selected the Ex Libris Rosetta digital management and preservation solution for 120 academic libraries plus the State Library of Ohio. Rosetta will ensure long-term access to the OhioLINK Electronic Journal Collection (EJC), Electronic Book Collection (EBC), Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) Center, and Digital Resource Commons (DRC) collections. - OhioLINK sought a preservation system based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model that could integrate with its existing content management systems and support a wide range of processing workflows. As a large and complex consortium, OhioLINK required a solution that could be implemented and maintained in a way that suits a wide variety of content.

Digital Preservation Matters.