It’s not just a word

It’s not just a word. Helen Hockx. Things I cannot say in 140 characters.  April 7, 2017.
     Post that talks about her new job, to coordinate and develop a campus-wide strategy, and to oversee its implementation. Digital assets are managed but it now provides the opportunity to revisit the topic and address the gaps.  "A key finding is the strong focus on “now” – archiving and preservation are routinely overlooked. As a result, some digital assets have been lost and some are at risk."  A recommendation, considering "the 3 pillars of policy, process and technology" is to add “digital resources” to the university's goals where superb stewardship is required. Adding the word “digital” or calling out “digital resources” specifically, may not seem needed by some, but it emphasizes the need to "do a much better job with digital assets, if we applied the same rigor and coordinated approach." We still have a ways to go with digital archiving and preservation.

"So it is not just a word. Digital assets are a new class of resources which requires active care and management over time.  Adding it to the strategic mix is a recognition of their value, and of digital stewardship as a strategic priority. No. it is not just a word, it will have to come with commitment, ownership and resources." Some day we can remove the word “digital” from our strategic plan, "when preservation of digital assets is embedded in the organisational culture and operations, when there is no need to even mention it."

Digital Preservation Matters.

What Makes A Digital Steward: A Competency Profile Based On The National Digital Stewardship Residencies

What Makes A Digital Steward: A Competency Profile Based On The National Digital Stewardship Residencies. Karl-Rainer Blumenthal, et al. Long paper, iPres 2016. (Proceedings p. 112-120 / PDF p. 57-61).
       Digital stewardship is the active and long-term management of digital objects with the intent to preserve them for long term access. Because the field is relatively young, there is not yet a "sufficient scholarship performed to identify a competency profile for digital stewards". A profile details the specific skills, responsibilities, and knowledge areas required and this study attempts to describe a competency profile for digital stewards by using a three-pronged approach:

1. reviewing literature on the topics of digital stewardship roles, responsibilities, expected practices, and training needs
2. qualitatively analyzing current and completed project descriptions
3. quantitatively analyzing the results from a survey conducted that identified competencies need to successfully complete projects

"This study had two main outputs: the results of the document analysis (qualitative), and the results of the survey (quantitative)."  Seven coded categories of competence emerged from the analysis:

1. Technical skills;
2. Knowledge of standards and best practices;
3. Research responsibilities;
4. Communication skills;
5. Project management abilities;
6. Professional output responsibilities; and
7. Personality requirements.

Based on the responses for Very important and Essential, a competency statement representing this profile would suggest that "effective digital stewards leverage their technical skills, knowledge of standards and best practices, research opportunities, communication skills, and project management abilities to ensure the longterm viability of the digital record." They do this by:

• developing and enhancing new and existing digital media workflows
• managing digital assets
• creating and manipulating asset metadata
• commit to the successful implementation of these new workflows
• manage both project resources and people
• solicit regular input from stakeholders
• document standards and practices
• create policies, professional recommendations, and reports,
• maintain current and expert knowledge of standards and best practices for metadata and data management
• manage new forms of media

The study suggests that, in practice, technical skills are not always as essential in digital stewardship as job postings suggest. Hardware/software implementation and Qualitative data analysis skills were important to only half of the respondents. Workflow management is a universally important skill deemed ”Essential" by almost all respondents. Other categories appeared as Somewhat Important, or as areas that need further research.

The study suggests that "although specific technical skills are viewed as highly important in different settings, a much larger majority of projects required skills less bound to a particular technology or media, like documentation creation and workflow analysis."  Digital stewards should possess, not only a deep understanding of their field, but the ability to "effectively disseminate their work to others."

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Digital Preservation Gap(s)

The Digital Preservation Gap(s). somaya langley. Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge. 18 November 2016.
     This is a broader comment on the field of digital preservation and the various gaps in the digital preservation field. Some of these are:

• Silo-ing of different areas of practice and knowledge (developers, archivists etc.)
• Lack of understanding of front-line staff working with born-digital materials 
• Archivists, curators and librarians wanting a ‘magic wand’ to deal with ‘all things digital’
• Tools that are limited or currently do not exist
• Lack of knowledge to run the few available tools
• Lack of knowledge of how to approach problem-solving

At iPres "the discussion still began with the notion that digital preservation commences at the point where files are in a stable state, such as in a digital preservation system (or digital asset management system). Appraisal and undertaking data transfers wasn’t considered at all, yet it is essential to capture metadata (including technical metadata) at this very early point. (Metadata captured at this early point may turn into preservation metadata in the long run.)" First-hand experiences of acquiring born-digital collections provide greater understanding of what it takes to do this type of work and will help in developing policies.

It is important to understand common real-world use cases and experiences in acquiring born-digital collections. "Archivists have an incredible sense of how to manage the relationship with a donor who is handing over their life’s work, ensuring the donor entrusts the organisation with the ongoing care of their materials" but preservationists that are traditionally trained archivists, curators and librarians often lack technical skill sets.  On the other hand, technologists lack experience with liaising with donors first-hand. Both groups would benefit from the others. Sharing approaches to problem-solving is definitely important.  The term ‘digital stewardship’ may be more helpful in acquiring and managing born-digital materials. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Mark D. Wilkinson, et al. Nature. 15 March 2016. [PDF]
     "There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data." Good data management is not a goal in itself, but a conduit leading to knowledge discovery, innovation and the reuse of the data. The current digital ecosystem prevents this, which is why the funding and publishing community is beginning to require data management and stewardship plans. "Beyond proper collection, annotation, and archival, data stewardship includes the notion of ‘long-term care’ of valuable digital assets" so they can be discovered and re-used for new investigations.

This article describes four foundational principles (FAIR) to guide data producers and publishers:

• Findability,
• assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier
• data are described with rich metadata
• metadata clearly include the identifier of the data it describes
• data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource
• Accessibility,
• data are retrievable by their identifier using a standardized communications protocol
• the protocol is open, free, and universally implementable
• the protocol allows for an authentication and authorization procedure,
• metadata are accessible, even when the data are no longer available
• Interoperability, 
• data use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation
• data use vocabularies that follow FAIR principles
• data include qualified references to other (meta)data
• Reusability
• meta(data) are richly described
• (meta)data have a clear data usage license
• (meta)data have a detailed provenance
• (meta)data meet community standards

These FAIR principles guide data publishers and stewards in evaluating their implementation choices. They are a prerequisite for proper data management and data stewardship. Achieving these goals requires working together with shared goals and principles.

Digital Preservation Matters.

What Do We Mean by ‘Preserving Digital Information’? Towards Sound Conceptual Foundations for Digital Stewardship

What Do We Mean by ‘Preserving Digital Information’? Towards Sound Conceptual Foundations for Digital Stewardship. Simone Sacchi. Dissertation University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.2015. [PDF]
Preserving digital information is a fundamental concept in digital and data stewardship. This dissertation explains what successfully ‘preserving information’ really is, and provides a framework for understanding when and why failures might happen and how to avoid them. The lack of a formal analysis of digital preservation is problematic. Some notes and quotes from the dissertation:

• At a high level of generality, bit preservation means enabling the possibility for the same (set of ) bit sequence(s) to be discriminated at different points in time, and, potentially, across changes in the underlying storage technology." 
• Bit level preservation is a mean, not the goal, in digital stewardship. 
• As suggested by the OAIS definition of digital preservation, successful digital preservation is about “maintaining” or “preserving” information.
• Preserving information appears to be a metaphorical expression where a complex set of requirements needs to be satisfied in order for an agent to be presented with intended information
• The best contemporary theories of digital preservation do not focus on the preservation of any sort of object, but rather on preserving access.
• it is impossible to preserve a digital document as a physical object. One can only
  preserve the ability to reproduce the document.
• "You cannot prove that you have preserved the object until you have re–created it in some form that is appropriate for human use or for computer system applications.”
• “digital records are not stable artefacts”; they last only when certain circumstances are met
• Bit preservation is only the first required step for successful digital stewardship. Interpreting the bits such that an intended digital material obtains through appropriate performances is essential as well.
• Successful digital preservation of information can be conceived as sustained and reliable communication mediated by digital technology and agents involved in the communication process.

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.

Sustaining Our Digital Future Institutional Strategies for Digital Content

Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content. Nancy L Maron, Jason Yun and Sarah Pickle. Strategic Content Alliance. January 29, 2013. (PDF, 91 pp.)
The shift with digital media in scholarly communications is transformative; data sets, dynamic digital resources, websites, digital collections,  crowd sourced or born digital content: there are challenges and opportunities, along with questions about who is responsible for maintaining them, and how to maximize the value of the content.

Some findings:

• project have received support from the host institution, but few have plans for ongoing support.
• There are potential partners on campus, but project leaders do not seek them early
  enough when critical decisions are being made.
• Digital projects across campuses may be hosted by many groups, which poses challenges for discovery. There is often no single place for users to find digital projects and some projects can too easily slip from view.
• Current funding styles do not support ongoing operation
• „Campus-wide solutions are beginning to emerge, but even these tend to address just the basic “maintenance” issues of storage, preservation and access.
• „Focus is often on creating new content, with little thought about ongoing efforts to enhance the content or update user interfaces.

Recommendations:

•  Perform an early and honest appraisal to find which projects are likely to require support after completion:
1. Digital content requiring just “maintenance”: plan that the content will be deposited and integrated into some other site, database, or repository.
2. „Digital resources requiring ongoing growth and investment: These require early sustainability planning, including identifying institutional or other partners and careful consideration of the full range of costs and activities needed to keep the resource vibrant.
•  Be realistic in assessing the future needs of the resource at its outset and in continuing support.
•  „Identify campus partners early on.
•  „Consider how central your project is to the overall mission of the institution.
• „Consider if projects could be drawn together to create a deeper network of support, both for “maintenance” projects and those with the potential to really grow.
• Develop ways to help users find decentralized content and to reach out to content users. These could start as an inventory of all of the digital holdings or common catalogs.
• „Determine where scale solutions pay off, where experts are best placed to champion a project, or create common storage, usage and preservation systems for an organization.
• Continue to identify and support ongoing development of the “front-end”, including user needs, interface development, and content enhancement. Pay attention to the changing needs of users and determine what enhancements the digital resource will require.

Libraries, museums, technology departments, and digital humanities centres are among the players that have begun to emerge as potential leaders of greater coordinated digital support on university campuses. Libraries have begun to consider the support of digital resources to be a critical part of their missions. Some universities provide advisory support to project leaders and libraries provide help for digital projects, from help to understand grant requirements, co-developing projects, providing hosting, curation, and preservation expertise.

 Sustainability and Use: 

•  Research data platforms: At some institutions major initiatives are underway to develop research data platforms. The goal of the platform is not just preservation and storage but access and reuse. The first step is to have a platform. From there they can test and refine the service for researchers depositing data sets, library  curated collections, and university departments.

• "A coherent digital policy from early review, guidelines on costings and deposit standards, to forecasting what ongoing activities will be needed and who will carry them out, would ideally remove much of the risk of “digital time bombs” while obliging both project leaders and university leaders to take a moment to envision the ongoing impact they want these resources to have, and how to best achieve that."

• Unlike universities (who often play the role of reluctant, passive, or simply unaware host, to a great deal of digital content created by their scholars) museums and libraries tend to be the ones initiating this work and are eager to build and maintain these collections.

• Despite the benefits of centralisation, the mere presence of a catalogue and centralised
  repository does not ensure greater usage of or engagement with its holdings.

• Many institutions devote considerable attention to the upfront creation of content, but not nearly as much to its ongoing enhancement or reuse, resulting in collections that are certainly present in the main catalogue, but otherwise exist only as capsules of content, frozen in time.

•  Once the project is finished, management of the digital resource is not always clear.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital Stewardship: What’s in (Some) Names?

Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital Stewardship: What’s in (Some) Names?  Butch   Lazorchak. The Signal. August 23, 2011.
     We often use “digital preservation,” “digital curation” and  “digital stewardship” interchangeably without thinking about the differences or what the name is. 
Preservation is defined as keeping something in its original state.
Curation looks at selection, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets in addition to their preservation.

Curation is useful for looking at the entire life of the materials and concentrates on "building and managing collections of digital assets and so does not fully describe a more broad approach to digital materials management.

Stewardship looks at holding resources in trust for future generations which can include both preservation and curation.

Digital Preservation Matters.