Saskatchewan Archives digitizing 560,000 newspaper pages from Second World War years

Saskatchewan Archives digitizing 560,000 newspaper pages from Second World War years. Arthur White-Crummey. Regina Leader-Post. August 28, 2019.
     This is an article about the digital preservation laboratory of the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan and the project of scanning and auditing a collection of weekly newspapers from 160 Saskatchewan communities. The Archives is marking the 80th anniversary of Canada’s entry into the Second World War by digitizing its trove of community newspapers covering the years 1939 to 1945. There are 560,000 pages for that period alone, just part of a massive collection of 10 million pages extending from 1878 to the 1960s.

The archivist views digitization "as a way of ensuring the survival of those priceless records. The newspapers themselves have largely disappeared".  But digitization is about more than preservation, it’s a way of “democratizing the record.” People no longer have to travel to local areas to view the resources. “They can now go online anywhere in the world. That’s what it’s all about.”

Digital Preservation Matters.

In-House Digitization with the Lossless FFV1 Codec At the University of Notre Dame Archives. AMIA Poster

In-House Digitization with the Lossless FFV1 Codec At the University of Notre Dame Archives. Erik Dix and Angela Fritz, University of Notre Dame Archives. AMIA 2018. Poster. [pptx].
     An interesting poster at AMIA which shows their digitization workflow and processing steps from accessioning to preservation system.
WHY FFV1 as a codec for Digital Preservation Masters?
1. Lossless compression (no quality loss)
2. A Standard Definition FFV1 file is ca. 46 % of the size of the uncompressed file.
    A High Definition FFV1 file is ca. 57 % of the size of the uncompressed file.
3. FFV1 is part of the FFmpeg project and open source
4. It is safe for long term preservation.
5. Encoding into FFV1 can be done with low cost Windows PCs.
6. The video is captured in FFV1 in real time.
7. Standard definition FFV1 files can be played with the VLC media player

Digitization Workflow

Accessioning as Processing:

• Archives conducts a preliminary inventory, assigns collection code,  creates CMS record 
• AV materials transferred to AV Archivist for a preservation and digitization assessment
• Descriptive and technical metadata gathered
• Analog materials reorganized and stabilized for long-term storage.

Basic Metadata Creation:

• AV Archivist creates item–level metadata
• Descriptive and technical metadata promotes access and discoverability
• Descriptive metadata added to finding aid and uploaded to the Archives, the IR, and ILS

Inspection & Prep of A-V materials:

• Only requested AV items or at-risk items will be digitized 
• Videotapes often require baking or splicing

VCRS without SDI output:

• The digitization capture card uses SDI [Serial Digital Interface] connections. 
• VHS, Betamax, and older professional formats, e.g. 1” type C, U-matic don’t have SDI outputs. 
• A DPS-575 frame synchronizer is used to create a SDI signal from the S-video or output of these items
• Basic color correction is done at this step if necessary. 
• The SDI signal from the frame synchronizer is then split in two to feed a Windows PC for the creation of the FFV1 preservation file and to feed a Mac computer to create an Apple ProRes 422 mezzanine file.

VCRs with SDI output:

• They have VCRs for the DV tape family from Mini DV up to DVCPro HD, DVCam, and HDV, as well as the Betacam tape family from Betcam to HDcam that can output an SDI or HD-SDI signal. 
• The signal is also split in two to simultaneously create a FFV1 file on a Windows Pc and an Apple ProRes 422 file on a MAC.

Digital Preservation System:

• Use an LTO tape library for the storage of our digitized files. 
• Currently, the Archives is evaluating digital preservation systems for implementation. 
• Archives capabilities will be expanded to provide digital preservation micro-services to ensure continued access to its digital collections.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Deadline 2025: collections at risk. -- "Tape that is not digitised by 2025 will in most cases be lost forever."

Deadline 2025: collections at risk. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. August 2017. [PDF]
     This document is relevant for our own library as we increase our focus on video preservation in our collections. In this document, I consider digitization to mean digitization for preservation.

Some notes from the document:

• "There is now consensus among audiovisual archives internationally that we will not be able to support large‑scale digitisation of magnetic media in the very near future." 
• "Tape that is not digitised by 2025 will in most cases be lost forever."
•  Much of what is now this nation’s heritage originated in the analogue era of the 20th century and has been handed down on various magnetic tape formats.
• "All tape-based formats created in the 20th century are now obsolete. Tape that is not digitised by 2025, we risk losing forever. This creates a deadline, and a dilemma, for those entrusted with the care of these precious memories."
• At current rates, not all magnetic tape can be saved in time, meaning that much will of the cultural heritage will be lost to future generations. 
• "Considerable resources are required to ensure all surviving tape-based media is digitised and managed for
  long-term digital storage and access." 
• Quite a lot of our history on tape finishes up in landfill just because it is seldom valued at the time that decisions about its preservation are being made. 
• "Our audiovisual heritage is too precious to lose"

Many recordings, radio broadcasts and TV programs have already been lost. Recordings have been discarded or destroyed once their immediate broadcast life was deemed over, or erased to be reused, and some live radio and television programs were not recorded at all. In the next decade we stand to lose much of our vital cultural memory unless we act swiftly to invest in digitisation infrastructure and capability.

Some benefits of preserving these recordings are:

• The historical record connects us to who we were, and who we are. 
• The original content in many collections becomes accessible and it creates knowledge.  
• Making these resources discoverable and accessible provides a tangible return on the considerable investment in creating them.
• "Unlocking a treasure trove of images and sounds of the past will inspire creators of new works, and encourage" the creation of new content.
• These preservation projects will promote "specialised skills development and help retain expertise within the cultural sector and the audiovisual industries."

We are now in a better position to measure the positive impacts of digitising our collections with The Balanced Value Impact Model developed by Simon Tanner at King’s College, which "balances tangible gains from economic, social and innovation perspectives with harder to measure cultural values".  It is important to develop a framework for preserving audiovisual collections along with sufficient investment to ensure future access to and celebration of the at-risk collections. The digitisation costs are not disproportionate to the investment already made in the production, collection, storage and preservation of our audiovisual heritage. There is still time to avoid the "preventable loss of an irreplaceable part of our heritage."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Church Preserves Precious Records of African Nation

Church Preserves Precious Records of African Nation. Newsroom. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 28 September 2017.  [YouTube]
     In Freetown, Sierra Leone, paper records dating back to the early 1800s are disintegrating at an alarming rate due to poor storage conditions, heat, humidity and frequent handling. The staff often pool money just to keep the lights on one or two days a week and were making a “frantic effort” to preserve copies of records by hand. “I had my heart broken because of the conditions of how these records are kept and the way that the people are working here, giving the best of themselves to preserve what they can for people and families of Sierra Leone.”  Despite valiant efforts by dedicated caretakers, rampant deterioration of the tattered records threatened to obliterate the very history of the nation. This changed with a plea from the government of Sierra Leone to the LDS president, asking for help in preserving the at-risk records.

The Church approved a project to image the dilapidated birth and death records and make them available online. FamilySearch has began the process of digitizing records in Freetown and in towns and remote villages across the country, and works with interfaith leaders such as The Catholic Church which has opened its record vaults to be part of the preservation project. “Any kind of record at all is crucially important because it becomes a database for future generations.” The preservation project will preserve some 4 million records.  FamilySearch is engaged in similar digitizing projects in countries all over Africa.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Scientific Archives in the Age of Digitization

Scientific Archives in the Age of Digitization. Brian Ogilvie. The University of Chicago Press Journals. March 2016.
     Historians are increasingly working with material that has been digitized; they need to be aware "of the scope of digitization, the reasons why material is chosen to be digitized, and limitations on the dissemination of digitized sources."  Some physical aspects of sources, and of collections of sources, are lost in their digital versions. Some notes from the article:

• "Digitization of unique archival material occupies an ambiguous place between access and publication."
• digitized archives reproduce unique archival material with finding aids but without significant editorial commentary that allows for open-ended historical inquiry without the need to travel to archives  
• the digitized archive also raises questions and challenges for historical practice, specifically 
• the digitizing decision and funding
• balancing digital access against some owners’ interests in restricting access
• aspects of the physical archive that may be lost in digitization
• the possibility of combining resources from a number of physical archives
• most digitization projects have been selective in their scope
• scholars cannot assume that material has been digitized, nor that all material has been digitized, unless the archive specifically states that
• digitized material is not always freely available, e.g. subscription based archives
• many archivists "fear that their traditional task of preparing detailed collection inventories is under threat owing to dwindling resources and the demand for digitization."

Digital Preservation notes:

• projects have undeniable benefits for the preservation of documents and access to them.
• In the interest of preserving their holdings and disseminating them to a broad public, archives are increasingly digitizing their collections. 
• historians interested in digital preservation of archives, and electronic access to them, would be well advised to seek out collaborations with archivists.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Calculating All that Jazz: Accurately Predicting Digital Storage Needs Utilizing Digitization Parameters for Analog Audio and Still Image Files

Calculating All that Jazz: Accurately Predicting Digital Storage Needs Utilizing Digitization Parameters for Analog Audio and Still Image Files. Krista White. ALCTS. 14 Apr 2016.

  The library science literature does not show a reliable way to calculate digital storage needs when digitizing analog materials such as documents, photographs, and sound recordings in older formats."Library professionals and library assistants who lack computer science or audiovisual training are often tasked with writing digital project proposals, grant applications or providing rationale to fund digitization projects for their institutions." Digital project managers need tools to accurately predict the amount of storage for digital objects and also estimate the starting and ongoing costs for the storage. This paper provides two formulae for calculating digital storage space for uncompressed, archival master image and document files and sound files.

Estimates from earlier sources:

• thirty megabytes of storage for every hour of compressed audio,  
• one megabyte for a page of uncompressed, plain text (bitmap format)
• three gigabytes for two hours of moving image media
• 90 megabytes for uncompressed raster image files, 
• 600 megabytes for one hour of uncompressed audio recording, 
• “nearly a gigabyte of disk space,” for one minute of uncompressed digital video.
• 100 gigabytes (GB) of storage for 100 hours of audio tape
• These can be adjusted to alter both file size and quality, depending on the choice of digitization standard, the combination of variables used in a chosen standard and the quantity of digital storage required.

Some additional notes from the article:

• As the experiments demonstrate, the formulae for still image and audio recordings are extremely accurate. They will prove invaluable to digital archivists, digital librarians and the average user in helping to plan digitization projects, as well as in evaluating hardware and software for these projects. 
• Digital project managers armed with the still image and audio formulae will be able to calculate file sizes using different standards to determine which standard will suit the project needs. 
• Knowing the parameters of the still image and audio formulae will allow managers to evaluate equipment on the basis of the flexibility of the software and hardware before purchase. 
• Using the still image and audio calculation formulae in workflows will help digital project managers create more efficient project plans and tighter grant proposals. 
• The formulae for calculating storage sizes: length of the original audio recording, sampling rate, bit depth, and number of audio channels. 
• Formula for Calculating File Sizes of Uncompressed, Still Images:

One of the tables in the article on calculating file size and comparing to the actual size:

Digital Preservation Matters.

Students' project revolutionizes BYU library digitization

Students' project revolutionizes BYU library digitization. Braley Dodson. Daily Herald. Apr 13, 2016.
     The Mass Archival Scanning System (MASS) was created by a group of seven engineering students working with staff at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.  The system is a way to speed up the process of digitizing documents from the manuscript collections.  The system, which can work eight to 10 times faster, uses an automatic rotating table that moves the documents under a camera inside a hood that controls the lighting. Once the document is imaged, the table rotates to the next document.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Fulfill Your Digital Preservation Goals with a Budget Studio

Fulfill Your Digital Preservation Goals with a Budget Studio. Yongli Zhou. Information Technology and Libraries. April 4, 2016.   [PDF]
     Article about finding a cost effective solution for digitizing materials as part of preservation goals. Many institutions use in-house high-end scanners to scan historical and other materials. "No digitization equipment or system is perfect. They all have trade-offs in image quality, speed, convenience of use, quality of accompanying software, and cost." The article discusses in depth the comparison tests for using digital cameras for digitizing, as opposed to the expensive scanners that do not fit in many library budgets. The result is that for most archival materials a Digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) camera will do a better job than an overhead scanner. In most of the cases, the camera produced superior images. "This paper compares images delivered by a high-end overhead scanner and a consumer-level DSLR camera, discusses pros and cons of using each method, demonstrates how to set up a cost-efficient shooting studio, and presents a budget estimate for a studio."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Data-driven Decision Making at L. Tom Perry Special Collections

Data-driven Decision Making at L. Tom Perry Special Collections. Ryan Lee, Cory Nimer, Gordon Daines. Society of American Archivists. November 2015.
     Archivists are looking for new ways to identify materials to digitize. This case study looks at data-driven digitization and the decision process.  This study brings Web analytics and in-house use statistics together as a way to make more informed, data-driven decisions. "Digitizing and mounting materials publicly on the internet is a form of publishing, and success in publishing means knowing and targeting viewers." Unique Page Views "provide a sense of general interest, while circulation statistics suggest personal engagement with the materials themselves." These metrics provide a more accurate sense of the usefulness of the collections.

"The findings of this study reflect much of what Peter Hirtle suggests would happen as we digitize more and more of our special collections materials, when he stated that “[e]lectronic access will replace most uses of printed, paper copies, [and]… [t]he use of paper originals will decrease."  The study found that "digitization has often significantly reduced the use of originals in Perry Special Collections".

Digital Preservation Matters.

High-speed digitization of historic artifacts

CultLab3D’s 3D scanning conveyor belt allows high-speed digitization of historic artifacts. Benedict. 3D printer and 3D printing news website. Nov 19, 2015.
     Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD have developed CultLab3D: a 3D scanning system that can create digital images of 3D objects. The project aim is to provide mass digitization, annotation and storage of historical artifacts for museums and other places of preservation. Quotes and notes from the article:

• "Digital preservation is one of the most important methods of sustaining our cultural history."
• digital preservation makes it possible to created and maintain scans of written texts
• "Digital preservation of texts is one thing, but the preservation of physical artifacts is quite another."
• while there is no real substitute for an authentic historical artifact, something should be done to preserve historical artifacts

This organization believes that the digital preservation of historical artifacts via 3D scanning is undoubtedly a worthwhile endeavor.

Digital Preservation Matters.

This is how we wash ... discs!

Så gør vi sådan, når vi vasker… plader! Digitalbevaring.dk. October, 2015.
     The Danish State Library has started to wash a large part of their old records so they can be digitized. Some can be cleaned by just wiping off the dust with a dry brush but other need a turn in the discwasher. This is a machine that looks like a turntable but instead of a needle has a small vacuum system that sucks water from the record. Another article on this, Disc washing at the library, has more information with images of the process of digitizing the 78 rpm record discs. There are about 37,000 Danish shellac discs (78 rpm records) and the audio engineer digitizes about 10 to 12 discs a day.  The process is to register the items to be digitized, check the condition of the disc, after which they are washed and cleaned. About three or four discs can be washed per hour. In the digitization room is the recording machine and an audio engineer who listens to the record and based on what he hears, chooses one of four different pickup needles for the final digitization. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects

Questions to ask when you learn of digitization projects. Sarah Werner. Wynken de Worde. 6 October 2015.
    With new digitization projects that we hear about it may be helpful to ask some questions:

1. Who financially benefits from such agreements? Sometimes researchers forget that the primary commercial digitization projects "isn’t to enable access to cultural heritage materials but to make money. And cultural heritage institutions have not always prioritized open access to their collections over monetizing them, either."
2. Who is going to have access to the resulting images? In commercial projects the results "are typically limited to institutions who can pay to subscribe to the commercial database". 
3. Who is not going to have access to the images? It is important to realize who will be excluded from such projects.  
4. What will you be able to do with the resulting images? "Most commercial databases retain copyright over their digitized products and do not license them beyond personal use".
5. How will this impact the ability of researchers to access the original documents? "If you are a holding institution that will be restricting access to your newly digitized collection, will you help fund scholars to come use your database if their institution doesn’t subscribe to it?"

Without knowing these kinds of details we won't know if these enterprises are "good or bad things". The projects can be expensive, and balancing the access and the cost can be complicated. "But researchers and librarians should ask themselves this list of questions before cheerleading announcements." How will we support institutions in order to "create high quality digitizations without selling our cultural heritage to the highest bidder?"

Digital Preservation Matters.

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library awarded grant preserving manuscript collections

Hill Museum & Manuscript Library awarded $4 million grant from Arcadia Fund. Press release. St. Johns University. September 22, 2015.
     Arcadia Fund has awarded a grant to the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John's University for photographic manuscript preservation, which is HMML's core mission. Rev. Columba Stewart said HMML is "currently preserving manuscript collections at sites in Lebanon, Iraq, the Old City of Jerusalem, Egypt, Mali and Malta" and the digital images and related cataloging will be available to scholars throughout the world. HMML has formed partnerships with over 520 libraries and archives to photograph more than 145,000 manuscripts from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and India.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Trouble With Digitizing History

The Trouble With Digitizing History. Tina Amirtha.  Fast Company. September 11, 2015.
     Sound and Vision and two other national institutions finished digitizing the Netherlands’ audiovisual archives last year at a cost of $202 million over seven years. The project digitized 138,932 hours of film and video, 310,566 hours of audio, and 2,418,872 photos. Of these, only 2.3% of its digitized archive is publicly available online. Schools and researchers are allowed to access 15% of the archive the website while copyright concerns cover the rest.

• "It doesn’t make sense to digitize everything. "You have ask yourself, ‘Who are you doing this for?’" Researchers may be interested in a narrow set of media, while the public may prefer a skim of the archives.
• "Honestly, only a little bit of the funding should go towards digitization and the rest, towards digital preservation".
• Digitization on its own won’t bring memory institutions into modernity, but the innovation will come from refining the methods used for preserving the digital files.
• "Any new technology that better preserves and increases public access to these audio and video materials should aim to fulfill the greater mission of any national audiovisual archive: to be the "media memory" of the country."
• "Collecting everything in one place online, it’s a very linear way of thinking."

The archivist sees an archive’s role in society changing by decentralizing the selection decisions and creating direct relationships with the creative community. "Sound and Vision has eliminated all of its curators and now trusts the community to curate its media memory. Archives need to be at the start of the creative process".

Regardless of which online content platform is used to host creative media,the important thing is for the library to continue professionally archiving today's digital recordings.

"There is no one single place that can serve the world’s creative output. The more we can collaborate, nationally and internationally, the more successful we’re going to be,"

Digital Preservation Matters.

FY2014 Preservation Statistics Report

 FY2014 Preservation Statistics Report. Annie Peterson, Holly Robertson, and Nick Szydlowski. American Library Association. August 10, 2015. [PDF report]
     The majority of the survey respondents were academic libraries (64% ). The results are for review and analysis. The Preservation Statistics Survey no longer distinguishes between reformatting and digitization for access versus preservation. It encourages preservation units and digital initiatives units to cooperate and foster ongoing, mutually beneficial relationships.

• The figures show that 80% of AV items digitized were magnetic media. AV preservation is urgent and more research is needed to understand the issues.
• Microfilm accounted for 60% of the non-print items digitized.
• Most participants (62%) responded that digital preservation responsibilities take place outside of the preservation unit.  The majority of those have digital initiatives units that are responsible for the digital preservation activities. Others indicated that digital preservation is an activity spread across multiple units, while the remaining institutions report that digital preservation activities are the responsibility of a collections management or technical services unit or in the smallest group it is part of an IT / Systems unit. 

Respondents are managing approximately 10 Petabytes of data and added over 26 million items to their digital repositories in FY2014. Web archiving accounted for 60% of the items added to digital repositories.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Vatican Library digitizes ancient manuscripts, makes them available for free

Vatican Library digitizes ancient manuscripts, makes them available for free. Justin Scuiletti.  PBS NewsHour. October 22, 2014.
The Vatican Apostolic Library is digitizing its archive of ancient manuscripts and making them available to view.  view. They are undertaking an extensive digital preservation of its 82,000 documents.  The entire undertaking is expected to take at least 15 years and cost more than $63 million. “Technology gives us the opportunity to think of the past while looking towards the future, and the world’s culture, thanks to the web, can truly become a common heritage, freely accessible to all, anywhere and any time.” The current list of digitized manuscripts can be viewed through the Vatican Library website  and the project website.

Digital Preservation Matters.

ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation

ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation. Sam Brylawski, et al. National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. May 2015. [PDF, 252 pp.]
CLIR, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) and the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) of the Library of Congress, has published CLIR Publication No. 164, an excellent guide to audio preservation.
"Our audio legacy is at serious risk because of media deterioration, technological obsolescence, and, often, lack of accessibility. This legacy is remarkable in its diversity, ranging from wax cylinders of extinct Native American languages to tapes of local radio broadcasts, naturalists’ and ethnographers’ field recordings, small independent record company releases, and much more. These recordings are held not by a few large organizations, but by thousands of large and small institutions, and by individuals. The publishers hope that this guide will support and encourage efforts at all institutions to implement best practices to help meet the urgent challenge of audio preservation."

Chapters include:

• Preserving Audio (Recorded Sound at Risk, Preservation Efforts, Roles)
• Audio Formats: Characteristics and Deterioration (Physical, digital)
• Appraisals and Priorities (Tools; Selection/collection policies, decisions)
• Care and Maintenance (Handling, assessment) and arrangement
• Description of Audio Recordings (Metadata, standards, tools)
• Preservation Reformatting (Conversion to digital files, metadata, funding)
• Digital Preservation and Access: Process, storage infrastructure
• Audio Preservation: The Legal Context (Copyright, control, donor agreements)
• Disaster Prevention, Preparedness, and Response
• Fair Use and Sound Recordings Lessons

Some notes from reading the publication:

• the ultimate goals of preservation are sustained discovery and use
• all these dissimilar recordings together represent is an audio DNA of our culture
• our enjoyment of the recordings has far exceeded our commitment to preserve them
• history is represented in sound recordings; it entertains and enriches us
• if compressed files are the only versions available to the public, we have no assurances that anyone is maintaining the higher fidelity originals
• efforts of large and small institutions and private collectors are needed to make a meaningful dent in the enormous volume of significant recordings not yet digitized for preservation
• if we are to preserve our audio legacy, all institutions with significant recordings must be part of the effort
• proactive attention, care, and planning are critical to the future viability and value of both analog and digital recordings
• institutions often have more items in their care than they have resources for adequate processing, cataloging, and preservation
• the potential technical obsolescence of the hardware to play a recording should influence priorities and resources allocated for preservation
• perhaps the most crucial feature a metadata schema is its degree of interoperability for sharing, searching, harvesting, and transformation or migration  
• the preservation choice is not binary "either we implement intensive preservation immediately and forever; or we do nothing". We should not delay action because the ideal cannot be achieved
• preservation metadata is the information needed to support the long-term management and
  usability of an object 
• the Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) is the de facto standard for digital audio archiving
• monitoring and planning to avoid obsolescence are important aspects of a solid digital preservation strategy
• audio preservation is an ongoing process that may be challenging and intimidating; setting priorities is central to a successful preservation strategy
• digital preservation will enable the fulfillment of the goal of long-term use (whether focused on education, scholarship, broadcasting, marketing, or sales)
• ensure that there is at least one geographically separate copy of all digital content
• recognize the use of sound recordings as sources of information by students and researchers
• libraries and memory institutions should provide points of cultural reference for the current generation of creators

Several free, open source software tools are available

• assessing audio collections for the purpose of setting preservation priorities
• The Field Audio Collection Evaluation Tool (FACET)
• Audio/Video Survey
• Audiovisual Self-Assessment Tool (AvSAP)
• MediaSCORE and MediaRIVERS
• metadata tools
• CollectiveAccess
• Audio-Visual and Image Database (AVID)
• AudioVisual Collaborative Cataloging (AVCC)
• PBCore

 "When libraries, archives, and museums exercise their legal rights to preserve and facilitate
access to information, even without permission or payment, they are
furthering the goals of copyright."

"The professional management of a collection requires the development of criteria for selecting and preserving collections of sound recordings. A selection or collection development policy defines and sets priorities for the types of collections that are most appropriate and suitable for an organization to acquire and to preserve. The basis for these criteria should be the goals and objectives of the individual institution."

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation links

Digital Preservation links . Julie C. Swierczek. scholar.harvard.edu website. June 2015.
A very thorough and up to date list of digital preservation resources on the internet. There are many topics, such as:

• Digitization
• Digital Forensics
• Digital Accessioning Workflows
• Guidelines/best practices
• Reports/whitepapers/publications/bibliographies/journals
• Metadata, vocabularies, XML and harvesting
• Standards
• Projects of interest
• Blogs
• Web archiving

 A very useful reference resource.

Digital Preservation Matters.

New Sources and Storage Options For Rosetta

Rosetta Users Group 2015: New Sources and Storage Options For Rosetta. Chris Erickson. June 3, 2015. [PDF slides]
This is my presentation at the Rosetta's User Group / Advisory Group held this past week.

We installed Rosetta in March 2012 and have ingested a number of collections in the preservation repository. In addition to those sources and collections we have already set up to work with Rosetta, we have been working with some new areas. These include:

• University Academic electronic records in SharePoint. Rosetta harvest tool for SharePoint
• New Library repositories, such as Digital Commons
• Harvest Canon camera raw images and ingest into Rosetta
• Ingest University videos and digitized files from the Audio Digitization project
• Program to gather information from Unstructured folders of archival objects and ingest into Rosetta

One of the things that everyone is struggling with is the lack of sufficient storage. Conventional storage is expensive and limited. So we are investigating alternative long term storage possibilities:

• Develop a Proof of Concept Project to ingest Rosetta content in DPN
• Amazon S3 Cloud Storage from Rosetta. Easy to connect to Rosetta.
• Hitachi - LG Data Storage (HLDS) Optical Archive System
• Long Term storage system 
• Lowest storage cost
• Single rack unit holds 1 PB of permanent storage; unlimited expansion
• Currently testing with our Rosetta system
• Reduce the need for refreshing or migrating content
• Plan to use with Millenniata M-Discs in the archive

What we are looking for in preservation storage:

• Sufficient capacity for our ever increasing content
• Reasonable long term cost
• Lower total costs of ownership
• Reduced cost of refreshing or migration
• Reliable and recoverable
• Archival media
• Industry Storage Partner
• Multiple copies, locations
• Secure storage
• Accessible
• Rosetta
• Network

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digitization and the Preservation of Knowledge

Digitization and the Preservation of Knowledge. The Media Preservation Initiative at Indiana University Bloomington. October 10. 2013.
Indiana University President Michael McRobbie, in announcing the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, said in an address: “For over 25 centuries, the great universities of the world have always had three fundamental missions:

• the creation of knowledge (that is, research and innovation),
• the dissemination of knowledge (that is, education and learning), and
• the preservation of knowledge.

We tend, these days, to mainly associate the first two of these missions with a university."

The advent of the digital age is giving importance of the third mission "the preservation of knowledge". Previously, the preservation of knowledge was the almost exclusive mission of libraries and museums. Digital material is vital to fully realizing the promise of online education. The digital collections are a large investment over many years. The digital collections will continue to grow, as will the scholarly dialog concerning them, which "defines the character, values and heritage of an institution." Preserving the collections in perpetuity fully maximizes the value of all these collections to the university and the community. The transformation of the third mission of universities from the physical to the virtual world of digitization is both essential and irreversible.

Also announced was an initiative would draw all digitization efforts together into a true university-wide strategy. The goal of this Digitization Master Plan is to digitize and store in some form all the existing collections of lasting importance to research and scholarship, and to ensure the preservation of all new research and scholarship that is born digital. This will support research, education and the preservation of knowledge.

Digital Preservation Matters.