Applying DP Standards For Assessment & Planning

Applying DP Standards For Assessment & Planning. Bertram Lyons. PASIG 2016. March, 2016.
     ISO 16363:2012. Audit & Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories defines recommended practices for assessing the trustworthiness of digital repositories. The document will help those who audit repositories, but also those to design or redesign their digital repository processes. Some highlights from the standard:

3.1 Governance and Organizational viability: The repository shall have a collection policy or other document that specifies the type of information it will preserve, retain, manage, and provide access to. Without the policy the collection scope is unclear and it becomes difficult to say no to out of scope content. The standard expects a policy to exist and be documented.

4.2 Ingest: Creation of AIPs: Organizations should have a description of how AIPs are constructed from SIPs. It should document all changes to the processes, as well as defining what happens to the content (such as normalization of files, etc.)

5.2 Security Risk Management: The repository should have a written disaster preparedness and recovery plan, including at least one off-site backup of all preserved information together with an off-site copy of the recovery plan. This means the organization should be prepared administratively.

The elements are scored as follows

• 0 - non-compliant or not started
• 1 - slightly compliant (needs a lot of work to do in address the requirement.
• 2 - half compliant: partially addressed but still significant work to do
• 3 - mostly compliant: mostly addressed and working on full compliance.
• 4 - fully compliant: can demonstrate the requirement is comprehensively addressed.

Elements needed:

• Documentation: records of policy, procedure, and outcomes of activities
• Policy: the definition of approaches and protocol for repository functions and procedures
• Procedures: specification of preservation and infrastructure management activities
• Software: development or configuration of preservation systems
• Infrastructure: procurement, monitoring, and management of hardware infrastructure
• Organization: organizational infrastructure including funding, staffing, and strategy
• Action Plan

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation the Hard Way: I may have deleted the Electronic Theses community

Digital Preservation the Hard Way. Hardy Pottinger. University of Missouri Library. Open Repositories 2015 Poster Session.June 9, 2015. [PDF]
Interesting poster at OR2015. Examines a situation of DSpace missing collections and what was done to restore them. Some interesting quotes from the poster and the abstract:

"This is not a story of how we used this tool set. This is a story of how we recovered from an accidental deletion of a significant number of items, collections, and communities--an entire campus's ETDs: 315 missing items, 878 missing bitstreams, 1.4GB of data, 7 missing communities, 11 missing collections--using a database snapshot and a tape backup. The SQL we developed to facilitate this restoration may be helpful, but it is our hope that in comparison, the effort required to implement a proper backup and preservation safeguard, such as DuraCloud and/or the Replication Task Suite, will rightly seem more appealing. In other words: here's how to do it the wrong way, but you'd really be better off doing things the right way.

“I may have deleted the Electronic Theses community. Is there any way to un-delete it?”
Seven missing communities, 11 missing collections, 315 missing items (containing 878 bitstreams). Only 1.4 GB of data. Born-digital data. This is a story of survival. Of that data, metadata, and everyone responsible for it.

“Disaster Recovery is not Digital Preservation.”
If you are a developer reading this, thinking about ways your institution could improve its backup strategy, I've got bad news for you. A backup strategy is not digital preservation.
     If you are the only person at your institution thinking of ways to improve your backup strategy, your first job, before you even start to change your backup strategy, is to find other people to work with you on digital preservation. Repository development is a difficult enough job, you do not need to also assume responsibility for ensuring the data you are storing is valid, usable and backed up.
     Digital preservation is a full time job. If you are not giving it your full attention, if you are just backing up your assetstore and database, you have already accepted the responsibility of digital preservation, you are just not doing the job.

Digital Preservation Matters.

6 disaster recovery do’s and don’ts from Hurricane Katrina survivors

6 disaster recovery do’s and don’ts from Hurricane Katrina survivors. Tony Bradley. Computerworld. Sep 1, 2015.
IT leaders in and around New Orleans have shared how they maintained or resumed business operations and what the experience has taught them. Some of the items are useful for any institution:

1. Do have a written business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Hold refresher courses on your plan and the policies. “Document your equipment, document your environment’s configuration, document all vendor contracts and support agreements [including contact information], and make sure information is accessible to more than just one or two individuals”
2. Do have a secondary site and/or cloud-based infrastructure. you should at least have a secondary location that is geographically separate from your primary site
3. Do partner with vendors you trust
4. Do test your infrastructure and disaster recovery plan regularly. Evaluating any aspects of your continuity and disaster recovery plans that rely on others. It is more important than ever to have a reliable partner who can back up your IT infrastructure.
5. Don’t have single points of failure. Use a combination of cloud, hosted and on-premises solutions to keep critical applications and data safe and accessible.

Digital Preservation Matters.

UK High Court: Format changes, backups, and private copies are illegal

Ripping music and films illegal again after High Court overturns new law. BBC Newsbeat. 17 Jul 2015.
     The UK government introduced a law, Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014 in October 2014, meaning it was legal to transfer music from one format to another in your home library and to make back-ups for personal use. (It was still illegal to share those copies with friends or family or to sell on that music or data). But that law has been overturned in the UK High Court which affects at least CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, MP3s, and e-books.
The High Court said the government acted unlawfully by introducing an exception to copyright for private copying without fair compensation. The change in the law has implications for teachers who use copyright materials on interactive whiteboards and writers who quote other sources.

The UK just made iTunes illegal. Buster Hein. Cult of Mac. August 6, 2015. 
     In a discussion with the UK Intellectual Property Office, they said “It is now unlawful to make private copies of copyright works you own, without permission from the copyright holder – this includes format shifting from one medium to another. It includes creating back-ups without permission from the copyright holder as this necessarily involves an act of copying.” 

[This will likely affect libraries, archives and museums who may receive donations of computers and media; they would need to ensure before processing that there are no copyrighted materials included.]

Digital Preservation Matters.

An interactive eGuide: Backup Solutions

 An interactive eGuide: Backup Solutions. Computerworld. June 2012. [PDF]

Disaster recovery is the ability to continue your mission-critical operations after an interruption of some kind. An organization must be able to restore applications and processes to the point where they were before the outage occurred. Organizations “with a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan have the ability to get back to a semblance of normalcy in a much shorter span of time than those without.”

Instead of focusing on technology,  put disaster recovery processes in place; prepare for the most likely causes of downtime. Decide what is most important. Store your data away from your physical site in the event of a natural disaster.  Develop strategies to address operational continuity,  IT recovery, and communication needs.   Understand all parts of the backup procedures.

• Test your backup/recovery (including cloud backup) at least one a year and make sure it actually works the way you want it to.
• Keep install files for your software, including security keys.

“Backup is really the insurance policy that you hope you never have to cash.

Digital Preservation Matters.