Digital Preservation Matters - April 2, 2010

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age. Kurt D. Bollacker. American Scientist. March-April 2010.

Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information

The general problem of data preservation is twofold. The first matter is preservation of the data itself: The physical media on which data are written must be preserved, and this media must continue to accurately hold the data that are entrusted to it. This problem is the same for analog and digital media, but unless we are careful, digital media can be more fragile.

The second part of the equation is the comprehensibility of the data. Even if the storage medium survives perfectly, it will be of no use unless we can read and understand the data on it. Unlike in the analog world, digital data representations do not inherently degrade gracefully, because digital encoding methods represent data as a string of binary digits (“bits”). Because any single piece of digital media tends to have a relatively short lifetime, we will have to make copies far more often than has been historically required of analog media. Like species in nature, a copy of data that is more easily “reproduced” before it dies makes the data more likely to survive.

In order to survive, digital data must be understandable by both the machine reading them and the software interpreting them. There are at least two effective approaches: choosing data representation technologies wisely and creating mechanisms to reach backward in time from the future.

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A Survey of the Scholarly Journals Using Open Journal Systems. Brian D. Edgar, John Willinsky. Educause Resources. March 4, 2010. [40 p. PDF]

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open source, online journal management and publishing platform. This study looks at scholarly communications using the open source software systems. survey to which 998 editors or staff members responded. The results point to how these journals – largely independent, scholar-published titles with roughly half

originating in the developing world – are not otherwise represented. Of the survey, 40 percent published research in the sciences, technology and medicine, 30 percent were social science journals, and 11 percent were in the humanities. 19 percent of the journals in the study were interdisciplinary.

The number of journals using OJS has been growing at an average rate of 81% per year. And the number of new journals that are starting, are using OJS at a rate of 47%. About half the journals using OJS are born digital. OJS looks at the effect that open source tools can have on journal publishing, and adds to the case for rethinking scholarly communication.

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Ensuring Perpetual Access: establishing a federated strategy on perpetual access and hosting of electronic resources for Germany. The Alliance of German Science Organisations. Final Report in English. March 30, 2010. [177p. PDF.]

Increasing digital content is a challenge for scientific institutions. This study is a basis for a national hosting strategy to “establish and finance sustainable structures for perpetual access as well as long-term preservation for electronic resources.” Research is critical to the economy. Large investments into the research need to be safeguarded and maintained. Any loss can impair research, and ensuring future access is an important challenge. One of the largest gaps is the “provision for perpetual access for e-journals.” Library access via hosting on publishers’ servers is not “sufficiently robust as a single perpetual access solution long-term,” though it may be the immediate approach. Independent perpetual access with partners is needed, such as Portico. There needs to be a “strategy to create an infrastructure for the storage and long-term preservation of digital documents, and which can guarantee perpetual access to licensed commercial publications and retro-digitised library materials.” PDF and XML with the NLM-DTD are becoming a metadata standard for published material.

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Jhove2-0.6.0 Download. Website. March 19, 2010.

A new alpha release of JHOVE2 is now available for download and evaluation. Some features include:

• Format identification, validation, feature extraction, and message digest.
• Recursive processing of directories, file sets, etc.
• Integration with DROID for file identification.
• Results formatted as text and XML

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Digital Preservation Matters - March 26, 2010

Archiving Britain's web: The legal nightmare explored. Katie Scott. Wired. 05 March 2010.

Websites are increasing recognized as being culturally valuable. But there are concerns about the ability to preserve them because of current copyright requirements. The British Library over the past 6 years has archived over 6,000 culturally significant websites. Currently they must contact every copyright holders of these sites, and only have a 24% response rate. Some feel there is a "'digital black hole' in the nation's memory" because of the difficulty in archiving the web sites. There is a proposal to change the law to allow the copy deposit act to include websites. Some look at an opt out option. The BBC has a "no take-down" rule.

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Canterbury Tales manuscript to be digitized. Medieval news. March 22, 2010.

The University of Manchester Library is planning to digitize the Canterbury Tales manuscript. This is part of a JISC funded project. The Centre of Digital Excellence supports universities, colleges, libraries and museums which lack the resources to digitize important works. In addition to the digitizing work, “they will also be exploring business models for the long term viability of digitisation.”

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ISO Releases Archival Standards. eContent. Mar 23, 2010.

Two documents from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) aim to provide guidelines for archiving patient information. "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Principles" and "Health informatics-Security requirements for archiving of electronic health records-Guidelines" look at topics of records maintenance, retention, disclosure, and eventual destruction. Electronic medical data must be stored for the life of the patient; there are legal, ethical, and privacy concerns.

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Elsevier and PANGAEA Data Archive Linking Agreement. Neil Beagrie. Blog. 03 Mar 2010.

Elsevier and the data library PANGAEA (Publishing Network for Geoscientific & Environmental Data) have agreed to reciprocal linking of their content in earth system research. Research data sets deposited at PANGAEA are now automatically linked to the corresponding articles in Elsevier journals on ScienceDirect. Science is better supported through the cooperation and the flow of data into trusted archives. “This is the beginning of a new way of managing, preserving and sharing data from earth system research.”

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Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive. Brian Stelter. The New York Times. March 14, 2010.

The International Amateur Scanning League plans to upload the National Archives’ collection of 3,000 DVDs in an “experiment in crowd-sourced digitization” using a DVD duplicator and a YouTube account. This is a small demonstration that volunteers can sometimes achieve what bureaucracies can’t or won’t. the DVDs are all technically available to the public, they are hard to see unless a person visits the archive or pays for a copy. The volunteers duplicate the DVDs then upload them to YouTube, the Internet Archive Web site and an independent server.

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Uncompressed Audio File Formats. JISC Digital Media. 10 February 2010.

This looks at the main features of uncompressed audio file types, including WAV, AIFF and Broadcast WAV (BWF). “Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave” but they also take the most resources. Digital audio recording measures the level of a sound wave at regular intervals and records that value as a number. “This bitstream is the ‘raw’ audio data, expressing the sound wave in its closest digital analogue. “ These uncompressed audio file types are ‘wrapper’ formats that take the original data and combine it with additional data to make it compatible with other systems.

The most common is the Waveform Audio File Format (WAV), which is limited to a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union created the Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) which is functionally identical to the WAV file except it has an extra header file for metadata. This is a recommended archive format and also has a 4 Gb file size. The European Broadcasting Union has recently added the Multichannel Broadcast Wave Format (MBWF)which combines the RF64 audio format (surround sound, MP3, AAC, etc) with a 64 bit address header and has a file size limit of 18 billion Gb. It is backwardly compatible with WAV and BWF. The Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is the native format for audio on Mac OSX.

“The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) recommend Broadcast WAV as a suitable archival format, for reasons of its wide compatibility and support, and its embedded metadata capability. For surround-sound or multichannel audio the MBWF format should be used. For archive PCM audio, bit depth should be a minimum of 24-bit, and sample rate a minimum of 48kHz to comply with IASA standards.” If compression is needed, lossless compression, which requires an additional encoding/decoding stage – codec) is the least destructive alternative. Some open-source lossless compression codecs are available, such as FLACC.

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Court Orders Producing Party to "Unlock" PDF Since Not in a "Reasonably Usable" Form. Michael Arkfeld . Electronic Discovery and Evidence - blog. February 15, 2010.

In this contractual action, the defendants disclosed 11,757-page summary in a PDF "locked" format precluding the plaintiff from being able to edit and or manage the summary without retyping it. The Court found that the defendants' locked format made it "completely impractical for use" and ordered that the defendants "unlock" the files.

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Digital Preservation Matters - March 16 2010

Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit. Patricia Cohen. The New York Times. March 15, 2010.

This looks at the archival material, including digital, from an author that is on display at Emory University. It highlights what research libraries and archives are discovering, that “born-digital” materials are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated. The “archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.” Computers have now been used for over two decades, but their digital materials are just now find their way into archives. The curator said “We don’t really have any methodology as of yet to process born-digital material. We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks, and we’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines.” The challenges including cataloging the material, acquiring the equipment and expertise to access the data stored on obsolete media. Do they try to save the look and feel of the material or just save the content? The computer editing meant that there are no manuscripts with pages with “lots of crossings-out and scribbling”. The display is providing the “emulation to a born-digital archive” similar to reproducing the author’s work environment. Emory is providing $500,00 to produce a computer forensics lab to do this kind of work. Others are impressed with the emulation, but their focus is storage and preservation of digital content. One center is trying to raise money to hire a to hire a digital collections coordinator. Until then, the digital materials are unavailable to researchers.

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More on using DROID for Appraisal. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. March 10, 2010.

The information that DROID supplies is useful but the output not optimally organized for reuse. But by regularizing the DROID CSV output the information became sortable and more useful. DROID was also useful in identifying files that did not use the standard file extension for an application, also to find files that needed attention or need to be converted. And it was very useful in the appraisal process. With it, the major migration problems could be identified and it helped to weed out inappropriate, duplicate, or private content.

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Data, data everywhere. Economist. February 25, 2010.

The world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is increasing rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done but it is also creating a host of new problems. The proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible. The way that information is managed touches all areas of life. The data-centered economy is still new and the implications are not yet understood.

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Archon™: The Simple Archival Information System. Website. 15 February 2010.

Version 3 of this software has been released. The software is for archivists and manuscript curators. It publishes archival descriptive information and digital archival objects to a user-friendly website. Functionality includes:

· Create standards-compliant collection descriptions and full finding aids using web forms.

· Describe the series, subseries, files, items, etc. within each collection.

· Upload digital objects/electronic records or link archival descriptions to external URLs.

· Batch import data

· Export MARC and EAD records

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Deluge of scientific data needs to be curated for long-term use. Carole L. Palmer. PhysOrg.com. February 24, 2010.

Data curation is the active and ongoing management of data through their lifecycle. It is an important part of research. Data is a valuable asset to institutions and to the scientific enterprise. Saving the publications that report the results of research isn't enough; researchers also need access to data. Data curation begins long before the data are generated, it needs to start at the proposal stage. Without the data there is the issue of replicating and validating a research project's conclusions. "Digital content, including digital data, is much more vulnerable than the print or analog formats we had before." selecting, appraising and organizing data to make them accessible and interpretable takes a lot of work and expense. "The bottom line is that many very talented scientists are spending a lot of time and effort managing data. Our aim is to get scientists back to doing science, where their expertise can make a real difference to society."

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Is copyright getting in the way of us preserving our history? Victor Keegan. The Guardian. 25 February 2010.

In theory, future historians will have a lot of information about our age. In reality, much of it may be lost. Much of the information is on web pages, and they have a short life expectancy. The British Library has launched the UK Web Archive, which will guarantee longevity to thousands of hand-picked UK websites. But this is only a small part. “The issue of copyright is a global nightmare for anyone interested in digital preservation.”

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"Zubulake Revisited: Six Years Later": Judge Shira Scheindlin Issues her Latest e-Discovery Opinion. Electronic Discovery Law. January 27, 2010.

This review of a case that addresses the issues of parties’ preservation obligations. Check here for the full opinion. The case revisits an earlier decision concerning e-discovery, or finding electronic documents, emails, etc, in court cases; obligations; and negligence for failure to keep records correctly. Some statements from the court opinion:

• By now, it should be abundantly clear that the duty to preserve means what it says and that a failure to preserve records, paper or electronic, and to search in the right places for those records, will inevitably result in the spoliation of evidence.
• While litigants are not required to execute document productions with absolute precision, at a minimum they must act diligently and search thoroughly at the time they reasonably anticipate litigation.
• The following failures support a finding of gross negligence, when the duty to preserve has attached: to issue a written litigation hold; to identify all of the key players and to ensure that their electronic and paper records are preserved; to cease the deletion of email or to preserve the records of former employees that are in a party's possession, custody, or control; and to preserve backup tapes when they are the sole source of relevant information or when they relate to key players, if the relevant information maintained by those players is not obtainable from readily accessible sources.
• The case law makes crystal clear that the breach of the duty to preserve, and the resulting spoliation of evidence, may result in the imposition of sanctions by a court because the court has the obligation to ensure that the judicial process is not abused.

A New Approach to Web Archiving

At the Marriott Library, we’ve recently begun looking into what it would take to archive websites that are important to the University. During some research into this area, I came across the proceedings of the 2009 International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW).

An interesting project is taking place in France that may change the way web archiving is approached. At University P. and M. Curie in Paris, researchers are developing a web crawler that will not only detect changes to a website but one that will be able to detect which changes are unimportant (changing ads on a page, etc.) versus which are important to the page’s content. If successful, this might greatly improve the effectiveness of the web archiving system because digital archives would no longer be gumming up bandwidth and storage space with needless data.

This project is taking place in conjunction with the French National Audio-Visual Institute (INA). The institute would like to archive French television and radio station websites. The visual component of the institute’s pages is very important to the project, not just the content.

According to the workshop proceedings, the project idea is to “use a visual page analysis to assign importance to web pages parts, according to their relative location. In other words, page versions are restructured according to their visual representation. Detecting changes on such restructured page versions gives relevant information for understanding the dynamics of the web sites. A web page can be partitioned into multiple segments or blocks and, often, the blocks in a page have a different importance. In fact, different regions inside a web page have different importance weights according to their location, area size, content, etc. Typically, the most important information is on the center of a page, advertisement is on the header or on the left side and copyright is on the footer. Once the page is segmented, then a relative importance must be assigned to each block…Comparing two pages based on their visual representation is semantically more informative than with their HTML representation.”

The main concept and hopeful contribution to the world of web archiving is summed up by the presenters as follows:

• A novel web archiving approach that combines three concepts: visual page analysis (or segmentation), visual change detection and importance of web page’s blocks.

• An extension of an existing visual segmentation model to describe the whole visual aspect of the web page.

• An adequate change detection algorithm that computes changes between visual layout structures of web pages with a reasonable complexity in time.

• A method to evaluate the importance of changes occurred between consecutive versions of documents.

• An implementation of our approach and some experiments to demonstrate its feasibility.

It will be interesting to follow up with this project as it reaches its conclusion and see how its results will affect current web archiving players like Archive-it.org as well as fellow research endeavors like the Memento Project.

You can read about this project in much more technical detail at the IWAW website (unless it’s been taken down and hasn’t been properly archived).

http://iwaw.europarchive.org/

Digital Preservation Matters - March 9, 2010

Accelerated Life Cycle Comparison of Millenniata Archival DVD [corrected link].. Ivan Svrcek. Naval Air Warfare Center. March 2010. [75 p. PDF]

The Life Cycle and Environmental Engineering branch at China Lake installation performed an accelerated aging test of Millenniata discs with current archival grade DVDs (Delkin, MAM-A, Mitsubishi, Taiyo Yuden, and Verbatim). The test evaluated the disc stability when exposed to combined light, heat and humidity. Besides using the standard tests for predicting the lifetime of a disc, the test included looking at the initial write quality and exposure to full spectrum of light. The test also looked at the drives used to burn the discs, and which drives worked best with which discs. One conclusion with the drives was that “the device used to record an optical media can have a great impact upon the write quality and should be considered in all data storage situations.” According to the ECMA standards, “All dye-based discs failed.” That is in contrast to the Millenniata discs: “none of the Millenniata media suffered any data degradation at all. Every other brand tested showed large increases in data errors after the stress period. Many of the discs were so damaged that they could not be recognized as DVDs by the disc analyzer.”

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Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information. Blue Ribbon Task Force. February 2010. [116 p. PDF]

“Ensuring that valuable digital assets will be available for future use is not simply a matter of finding sufficient funds. It is about mobilizing resources—human, technical, and financial—across a spectrum of stakeholders.” Major questions are what should we preserve, who is responsible, and who will pay for it. This looks at scholarly publications, research data, commercially owned culture content, and collectively produced web content. Three important components in developing preservation strategies :

1. When talking about preservation, make the case for use of the materials. A decision to preserve something now does not mean a permanent commitment of resources. The value and use may be clearer later.
2. Incentives to preserve must be clearly shown as being in the public interest.
3. There must be agreement on the roles and responsibilities of all concerned: the information creators, owners, preservers, and users.

It is important to reduce the cost of preservation as digital information increases. The areas for priority action include:

Organizational: Develop partnerships; ensure access to skilled personnel; sustain stewardship chain.

Technical : build capacity to support stewardship in all areas; lower the cost of preservation overall.

Policy: Create incentives; clarify rights of web materials; empower organizations.

Educational: promote education and training; raise awareness of the urgency of timely preservation actions.

• Sustainable preservation strategies are not built all at once, nor are they static. Sustainable preservation is a series of timely actions taken to anticipate the dynamic nature of digital information.
• Commitments made today are not commitments for all time. But actions must be taken today to ensure flexibility in the future.
• Sustainable digital preservation requires a compelling value proposition, incentives to act, and well-defined roles and responsibilities.
• Decisions about longevity are made throughout the digital lifecycle.
• A sustainable preservation strategy must be flexible enough to span generations of data formats, access platforms, owners, and users.
• Preservation decisions can often be seen as an incremental cost, and are often the same as decisions made to meet current demand.

Five conditions required for economic sustainability are:

1. recognition of the benefits of preservation by decision makers;
2. a process for selecting digital materials with long-term value;
3. incentives for decision makers to preserve in the public interest;
4. appropriate organization and governance of digital preservation activities; and
5. mechanisms to secure an ongoing, efficient allocation of resources to digital preservation activities.

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AAC Audio and the MP4 Media Format. JISC Digital Media. 12 February 2010.

From the JISC advice site: This is a guide to creating and using the AAC compressed audio resources. AAC is the successor to the MP3 format; this site explains the advantages of AAC over MP3. AAC offers significant reduction of audio file size while still retaining good sound quality. The AAC audio standard is a subsection of the MPEG-4 standard and the MP4 file type is often used to deliver content. Apple added the .m4a and .m4p extensions to designate audio content. AAC requires a compatible codec for the final user to be able to listen to it. AAC uses a lossy compression; so for standards-compliant sound archiving, Broadcast WAV format should be used according to the guidelines of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA). More on BWAV at the BBC site.

If you don’t need standards compliance or absolute fidelity for your archive, or if you don’t have the storage space for the much larger uncompressed BWAV files, “then you may want to consider AAC as the overall best currently available lossy compression method.” This is an excellent site for information and contains much more on the container, encoding, versions, filetypes, bitrate, metadata, the iTunes schema, and a simplified visual representation of an MP4.

Digital Preservation Matters - March 2, 2010

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation. Katherine Skinner, Matt Schultz. Educopia Institute. February 2010. [156 p. PDF]

Excellent guide created by MetaArchive, who developed the first private LOCKSS network in 2004. This work examines distributed digital preservation, successful strategies and new models . It will help others to join or establish a private LOCKSS network. It discusses the network architecture, technical and organization considerations, content selection and ingest, administration and copyright practices in the network. A distributed digital preservation system must preserve, not just back-up. The preservation process of contributing, preserving, and retrieving content depends upon the institution’s diligence. Ingested content is preserved not just through replication, but by the caches through a set of polling, voting, and repairing processes. Distributed digital preservation, by definition, requires communication and collaboration across multiple locations and between numerous staff.

The software provides bit-level preservation for digital objects of any file type or format, but it can also provide a set of services to make the preserved files usable in the future, such as normalizing and migrating. The MetaArchive network is a dark archive with no public interface; communication between caches is secure. Organizations collaborating on preserving digital content must examine the roles and responsibilities of members, address essential management, policy, and staffing questions, develop standards, and define the network’s sphere of activity. Ingest, monitoring, and recovery of content are critical steps for preserving the content.

Some interesting quotes from the guide:

• Paradoxically, there is simultaneously far greater potential risk and far greater potential security for digital collections
• many cultural memory organizations are today seeking third parties to take on the responsibility for acquiring and managing their digital collections. The same institutions would never consider outsourcing management and custodianship of their print and artifact collections;
• A great deal of content is in fact routinely lost by cultural memory organizations as they struggle with the enormous spectrum of issues required to preserve digital collections,
• A true digital preservation program will require multi-institutional collaboration and at least some ongoing investment to realistically address the issues involved in preserving information over time.
• One of the greatest risks we run in not preserving our own digital assets for ourselves is that we simultaneously cease to preserve our own viability as institutions.

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Encouraging Open Access. Steve Kolowich. Inside Higher Ed. March 2, 2010.

Conversations about open access to journal articles currently revolve around policy, not technology; about if the content should be made available, not how. “Without content, an IR is just a set of empty shelves.” A new model of repository focuses on giving researchers an online “workspace” within the repository where they can upload and preserve different versions of an article they are working on. The idea is to make publishing articles to the open repository a natural extension of the creative process. This is based on a survey where professors wanted:

• to be able to work with co-authors easily,
• to keep track of different versions of the same document, and
• to make their work more visible
• all while doing as little extra work as possible.

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In the digital age, librarians are pioneers. Judy Bolton-Fasman. The Boston Globe. February 10, 2010.

Book review of This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All By Marilyn Johnson.

• Among information professionals, Johnson notes there are librarians and archivists: “Librarians were finders [of information]. Archivists were keepers.’’ But the information revolution is affecting both.
• The digital age is making possible the creation of searchable databases of archives, but it’s also making information, especially on the Internet, more ephemeral and harder to collect.
• Information archivists “capturing history before it disappears because of a broken link or outdated software.”
• in a world where technology moves life at a breathtaking pace, “where information itself is a free-for-all, with traditional news sources going bankrupt and publishers in trouble, we need librarians more than ever’’ to help point the way to the best, most reliable sources.

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Installing OAIS Software: Archivematica. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. February 1, 2010.

One of several reports on open source tools the blog author is evaluating to help with ingest, storage, and access processes in archives. This post looks at Archivematica, and he likes the supportable model for facilitating archival work with electronic records. It is a Ubuntu-based virtual appliance which can exist alongside preservation tools on other systems. It can be installed locally and in a variety of ways. Worth looking in to.

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IBM announces massive NAS array for the cloud. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. February 11, 2010.

IBM has announced SONAS, an enterprise-class network-attached storage array capable of scaling from 27TB to 14 petabytes under a single name space. It is designed to provide access to data anywhere any time. The policy-driven automation storage software allows an institution to predefine where data is placed, when it is created, where and when it moves to in the storage hierarchy, where it's copied for disaster recovery, and when it will be eventually deleted.

Digital Preservation Matters - February 22, 2010

Appraisal Actions and Decisions. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. February 15, 2010.

Most development work on digital repositories focuses on the requirements of the OAIS reference model. But OAIS doesn’t say how records should be selected for deposit. While each archive has a different focus, selecting records for inclusion in an archive is heavily debated. The appraisal process requires careful and intelligent decision making by a person. When appraising electronic records, several tools are needed:

• examine, identify, compare, delete, rename, and reorganize records
  
• manage information concerning records surveys/assessments.
• manage submission agreements
• ensure that appraisal actions are documented.

A set of tools is needed to examine, characterize, delete and possibly, reorder records quickly. This would make it easier to decide if the records are within the scope of the archives policy, then take appropriate actions concerning them.

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E-Library Economics. Steve Kolowich. Inside Higher Ed. February 10, 2010.

Two studies from the Council on Library and Information Resources examine the implications of libraries changing to digital collections. Libraries seem to be headed in the direction of primarily digital infrastructures but the journey is slow going. Digital standards, such as those for eBooks, are still changing. “While they enjoy the searchability of electronic documents and databases, academics still prefer holding a book in their hands to read it.” The studies point to an average of $4.26 per book per year to keep the book on the shelf. The cost for digital is much less; the digital media repository Hathi Trust stores five million copies at between $0.15 and $0.40 per volume, per year. Books in high-density storage facilities cost only $0.86 per year to keep in usable condition. “The administrators who provide library budgets may be reluctant to fund new facilities to house print collections and may question large expenditures to support both print and electronic formats. Library directors must consider not only the immediate expectations of faculty, but also the long-term goals for the library.”

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Studies Cite Argument for, Resistance to Increased Digital Library Collections. Library Journal. February 11, 2010.

A reaction to the E-Library Economics article. The keys to success are to communicate with and educate the students and faculty why the changes are important; to emphasize the preservation of resources, security, and the benefits; and to make the electronic resources available without barriers. One concern, the “move to electronic collections requires certainty about access to digital collections and their persistence. Also, removing books would not change the fixed costs of the building. The report authors also acknowledge “that the business model for ebooks remains unsettled and that print plays an important role for resources that don't yet work so well in digital format."

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Using DROID for Appraisal. Chris Prom. Practical E-Records. February 17, 2010.

DROID is a tool to help archivists identify file formats. But it may be valuable in the appraisal process to help an archivist understand the components of a records series. By running DROID and analyzing the reports, it is possible to identify particular file formats outside of the proposed collection scope, especially useful if they are deep in a directory structure. Specific examples and processes used are outlined.

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Film Institute launches first digital archive in Wales. BBC News. 9 February 2010.

The British Film Institute has launched its first "digital jukebox" in Wales, allowing people to access its archive. The Mediatheque is already available in England. The system allows people to watch films and TV programs, currently 1,500 titles, from the national archive free of charge; 85% of the titles had not been released on DVD or online.

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Innovation: We can't look after our data – what can? Tom Simonite . New Scientist. 11 February 2010.

Anyone worried about the fragility of digital data and civilization’s chances to survive would do well to look to their own data stores first. “Most of us today are blithely heading for our own personal data disasters” because of benign neglect. Data is often lost more from disorganization than from a technological catastrophe, though that happens too. Two possible approaches are mentioned: the Self Archiving Legacy Toolkit (SALT); and the Pergamum project. We are in need of tools to help with diverse, disorganized digital archives which are becoming the norm.

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Court Finds E-Mails Stored on Old Archiving System Reasonably Accessible; Costs Exaggerated. Kroll Ontrack. Recent ESI Court Decisions. February 2010.

A court case where the defendant argued that e-mails archived on the company's "cumbersome" old system were not reasonably accessible. “The court found that the plaintiff should not be disadvantaged since the defendant, a "sophisticated" company, chose not to migrate the e-mails to the now-functional archival system and thus determined that the e-mails were reasonably accessible.”

Digital Preservation Matters - February 16, 2010

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Library of Congress. February 2010.
The Library of Congress has:

• established an internal process to create open source software.
• has created a new series that looks at innovative approaches to digital preservation and access. It starts “On the Leading Edge,” with a look at DigitalPreservationEurope.
• has released a or video “Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation”

The International Internet Preservation Consortium has released a web archives registry. The registry provides an overview of member web archiving efforts as well as access. It currently includes 21 archives from around the world.

ALA is launching its first Preservation Week on May 9 - 15, 2010.

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Results of Digital Preservation Costs Survey now available. Neil Beagrie. 03 February 2010.
The Keeping Research Data Safe 2 survey of digital preservation cost information is now available. The project was to identify institutions with cost information for preservation of digital research data and to conduct a survey of them. The collections will then be the basis of further study. The Summary Analysis of Data Survey Responses can be downloaded as a Word file, as well as each survey response. Survey questions included:

• Principal data file formats included
• Size of collection
• Identification of which types of costs they were tracking

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The Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing. Directory of Open Access Journals. February 5, 2010.
The online guide is now available and updated. It provides practical information and tools for those producing independent Open Access journals. The guide sections discuss: Planning, Setup, Launch, Publish, and Manage. It refers to several other guides, and provides an input ability for others to add their experiences.

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British Library to offer free ebook downloads. Richard Brooks. Times Online. February 7, 2010.
Over 65,000 19th-century works of fiction from the British Library will be available for free downloads this spring. The library, in partnership with Microsoft, began digitizing items several years ago. They will be available online for free, but printed copies will also be available from Amazon. The online and printed versions will look like the rare 19th-century editions. “Altogether, 35%-40% of the library’s 19th-century printed books — now all digitised — are inaccessible in other public libraries and are difficult to find in second-hand or internet bookshops.” They hope to extend this effort to books out of copyright dating from the early 20th century.

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Doc or Docx? Which Office Format to Use. Minda Zetlin. Inc. Feb 15, 2010.
The new Office formats have caused user irritation in trying to read the documents. Microsoft has free conversion programs but many refuse to use them. The newer file formats have an x at the end of the file extension, meaning they are based on Extensible Markup Language or XML. With docx, pptx, and .xlsx, Microsoft made a fundamental change with how the files are created. The files also use file compression to reduce the file size and to hopefully reduce the possibility of the full document becoming corrupted. Some suggest keeping the .doc format as the default. Some “save every document in three formats: .doc, .docx, and .pdf.”

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The National Geospatial Digital Archive: A Collaborative Project to Archive Geospatial Data. Tracey Erwin; Julie Sweetkind-Singer. GIS and Science. February 8, 2010.
This is a collaborative project to collect, preserve, and provide long-term access to at-risk geospatial data. he project partners created preservation environments at both universities, created and populated a format registry, collected more than ten terabytes of geospatial data and imagery, wrote collection development policies governing acquisitions, and created legal documents designed to manage the content and the relationship between the two nodes.” The article was published in the Journal of Map And Geography Libraries. The difference with geospatial data is that it may reside in complex, multi-file objects, and that it “can remain dynamic indefinitely due to the lifetime of the generating program and the need to be periodically reprocessed.” One of the preservation strategies is to attempt to create multiple copies, with varying capabilities. Preserving context is difficult because the data is voluminous. “It is now understood that access is inextricably linked to preservation.” “The results of the NGDA experience are multifaceted. In practical terms, the successful ingestion of data into working repositories is the most significant outcome.”

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Digital doomsday: the end of knowledge. Tom Simonite, Michael Le Page. 02 February 2010.
Recent doomsday article about the loss of digital data. “The current strategy for preserving important data is to store several copies in different places, sometimes in different digital formats. This can protect against localised disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes, but it will not work in the long run.” “There really is no digital standard that could be counted on in the very long term….”

Digital Preservation Matters - February 8, 2010

Online Recordkeeping: It's All in a Name. Mimi Dionne. Internet Evolution. February 2, 2010.

The born-digital record lifecycle has five stages, in chronological order: creation; distribution and use; storage and maintenance; retention; and disposition or archival preservation. All five stages are important. One of the best practices for born-digital records is uniform file naming protocols, including location, to encourage strong content management. These should align with the records retention policies. Organizations are better off if they select the information they need to retain and destroy what they don’t need. “The benefits of implementing a records program that includes regular records destruction have far-reaching influence not only on compliance issues and maintenance of a company’s IT environment but also the health of its budget.”

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SPIE to Preserve E-Books in Portico. Press Release. Portico. 2 February 2010.

Portico has agreed with SPIE (the international society for optics and photonics) to preserve its collection of e-books, currently 93 items. It already participates with Portico to preserve its e-journals. Portico now holds over 34,000 e-books and over 10,000 e-journals. The SPIE has also announced the launch of their digital library, which includes 120 SPIE Press titles from the Field Guides, Monographs, and Tutorial Texts series.

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Long-Term Preservation Of Web Archives – Experimenting With Emulation And Migration Methodologies. Andrew Stawowczyk Long. IIPC. December 2009. [54 p. PDF]

The decision to emulate or migration are largely based on personal beliefs, rather than on any particular evidence. We do not know which of these is more useful in the long term. All objects change over time, so ensuring long-term, useful access to collections requires we first define the most important aspects of an object that needs to be preserved. The “Preservation Intent” may be useful for this, which is what the institution intends to preserve for any given digital object and for how long. Also needed is the creator’s intent, the contextual information and the technical information.

Two possible approaches for institutions may be:

1. preserve digital objects over the next twenty years;
2. find means of preserving objects for longer.

Or an approach may include both: preserve items for 20 years while the search for longer preservation mechanisms continues. “Significant properties” means the properties of a digital object that are essential to the representation of the intended meaning of that object.

The author does not recommend either emulation or migration as a perfect solution to the problem at this current time. Also, their findings and recommendations include:

1. There are no tools suitable for long-term preservation of very large web archives
2. All preservation actions need to be based on a clearly defined “Preservation Intent”
3. Migration and emulation offer some time extensions to for short term access to digital objects.
4. Emulation seems to present higher risks as a long-term preservation methodology.

It is not possible to preserve it all. Priorities need to be established for practical, long-term preservation solutions. The best hope for adequate long-term preservation, lies in continuous and systematic work, researching various preservation methodologies, and improving our understanding of the future use of web archives.

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Is NAND flash about to hit a dead end? Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. February 4, 2010.

IM Flash Technologies has said that shrinking the technology much further may not be possible because of problems with bit errors and reliability. The number of electrons that can be stored in the memory cell decreases with each generation of flash memory, making it more difficult for the cells to reliably retain data.

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CNRI Digital Object Repository™. Corporation for National Research Initiatives. 19 January 2010.

(CNRI) has developed a new version of its Digital Object Repository Software. It is open source, flexible, scalable, secure, and has a suite that provides a common interface for accessing all types of digital objects. Redundancy is supported by a mirroring system with software to ensure that replicated objects are kept in sync.

Digital Preservation Matters - January 29, 2010

Preserving Born-Digital Legal Materials…Where to Start? Sarah Rhodes . VoxPopuLII. Cornell Law School. January 10, 2010.

Article well worth reading. We have already all heard the arguments for investing in digital preservation, how the digital world is ubiquitous, how ephemeral digital data is. “There is no denying the urgent need for libraries to take on the task of preserving our digital heritage.” Law libraries have a critically important role to play in preservation. The digital preservation field will always be in a constant state of change because technology is always changing. But there has been progress in creating tools, services, and best practices.

In the law libraries that they looked at, less than 7% of the digital preservation projects involved preserving born-digital materials. The remaining 93% involved preserving digital files created by digitizing physical originals. But those who responded to the survey said, by a margin of 2 to 1, that born-digital materials were in more urgent need of preservation than print materials. This may be a problem of not knowing where to start. In selecting materials for the digital archive, each library should each library establish digital archive selection priorities based on the unique institutional mandates and the research needs of its users. There is a strong case for preserving materials that may be redundant. In addition, academic law libraries should take responsibility for preserving digital content cited within their institutions’ law reviews to ensure that future researchers will able to reference source materials, and possibly the law reviews themselves.

The article looks at standards and systems. “Digital preservation represents an opportunity in the digital age for law libraries to reclaim their traditional roles as stewards of information, and to ensure that our digital legal heritage will be available to legal scholars and the public well into the future.”

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File Formats for Preservation. Malcolm Todd. DPC Technology Watch Report. December 2009.

Preserving intellectual content requires a firm grasp of the file formats used to create, store and disseminate it. Five main criteria for file format selection:

1. adoption: the extent to which use of a format is widespread
2. technological dependencies: whether a format depends on other technologies
3. disclosure: whether file format specifications are in the public domain
4. transparency: how readily a file can be identified and its contents checked
5. metadata support: whether metadata is provided within the format

These criteria should be used as a tool to create a clear preservation strategy appropriate to the repository. This must be done to manage the risk of obsolescence for the materials.

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Google Docs to allow storage of any type of file. Juan Carlos Perez. Computerworld. January 12, 2010.

Google is opening up its Docs hosted office suite so that users can store any type of file in it. It doesn’t mean that they can be worked on or edited online. File size limit has been increased to 250 MB. This is in addition to the G-drive online storage service The G-drive is alive! 1GB free, $.25/GB/year after that.

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Release of Web Curator Tool (WCT) version 1.5. Sourceforge. 2009.

The Web Curator Tool is an open-source workflow management application for archiving web sites. It is designed for use in libraries; it supports:

• Harvest Authorization: obtaining permission to harvest and make publicly accessible;
• Selection, scoping and scheduling: deciding what to harvest, how, and when;
• Description: adding basic Dublin Core metadata;
• Harvesting: downloading the selected material from the internet;
• Quality Review: ensuring the harvested material is of sufficient quality for archival purposes;
• Archiving: submitting the harvest results to a digital archive.

It was designed by the National Library of New Zealand, the British Library, and others. It is integrated with the Heritrix web crawler and supports job scheduling and the collection of descriptive metadata.

Scholarly Journals Introduce New Data Archiving Policy

Scholarly Journals Introduce New Data Archiving Policy

An important editorial about data archiving has just appeared online in the February issue of The American Naturalist.

To promote the preservation and fuller use of data, The American Naturalist, Evolution, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Ecology, Heredity, and other key journals in evolution and ecology will soon introduce a new data archiving policy to ensure that data supporting published articles is preserved and made publicly available. The policy has been enacted by the Executive Councils of the societies owning or sponsoring the journals.

For example, the policy of The American Naturalist will state:

This journal requires, as a condition for publication, that data supporting the results in the paper should be archived in an appropriate public archive, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad, or the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Data are important products of the scientific enterprise, and they should be preserved and usable for decades in the future. Authors may elect to have the data publicly available at time of publication, or, if the technology of the archive allows, may opt to embargo access to the data for a period up to a year after publication. Exceptions may be granted at the discretion of the editor, especially for sensitive information such as human subject data or the location of endangered species.

This policy will be introduced approximately a year from now, after a period when authors are encouraged to voluntarily place their data in a public archive. Data that have an established standard repository, such as DNA sequences, should continue to be archived in the appropriate repository, such as GenBank. Data can also be archived in a more flexible, interdisciplinary digital data archive such as the National Science Foundation–sponsored Dryad repository, at http://datadryad.org/.

Dryad is developed by the US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the University of North Carolina Metadata Research Center, in collaboration with with a consortium of partner journals.

Authors of the editorial, Michael C. Whitlock, Mark A. McPeek, Mark D. Rausher, Loren Rieseberg, and Allen J. Moore present the case for the importance of data archiving in science. This is the first of several coordinated editorials soon to appear in major journals.

Digital Preservation Matters - January 2010

Insight into digital preservation of research output in Europe. Tom Kuipers, Jeffrey van der Hoeven. PARSE.Insight. January 14, 2010. [83p. PDF]

A report of surveys concerning digital preservation of digital research data and publications, data sharing, roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in research and funding of research. Some of the findings.

• The possibility of re-analysis of existing data is the most important driver for preserving research data.
• The most important threat to preserving digital information is the lack of sustainable hardware, software or support of computer environment that may make the information inaccessible.
• Legal issues and fear of data being misused are the greatest barriers to sharing data.
• Publishers believe the most important reason for preservation is that it will stimulate the advancement of science
• The majority of publishers fear that data will not be sustainable when the current owner ceases
• Most publishers do not have an arrangement in place to preserve underlying research data. They believe the author is responsible for this.

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Scholarly Publishing Roundtable Report and Recommendations . Scholarly Publishing Roundtable. January 12, 2010. [31p. PDF] Direct link to the report.

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and develop recommendations to expand public access to the journal articles that came from research funded by US government agencies. They developed a set of principles to use going forward:

1. Peer review is critical to maintain high quality and editorial integrity.
2. Adaptable business models are necessary.
3. Scholarly and scientific publications can and should be more broadly accessible with improved functionality to a wider audience
4. Sustained archiving and preservation are essential complements to reliable publishing methods.
5. Research results need to be published and maintained in ways that maximize the possibilities for creative reuse and interoperation among sites that host them.

They provide a number of recommendations and conclude: “We urge publishers, librarians, universities, and scholars to consider these recommendations as creating an appropriate collaborative environment and putting an end to the previous decade of wrangling over access issues. All can then focus efforts on interoperability, reuse, and preservation with the argument that those features of the whole system strongly support public access; on broad, intelligent use of the products of federally funded research; and on future advances in support of both scholarship and public access to its results.”

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Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter. Library of Congress. January 2010.

The newsletter contains information on:

• Memento: Time Travel for the Web. A project looking at adding a time-based dimension to searching and browsing.
• Voice of America and the expanding role of digital materials at the Library of Congress.

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40th Anniversary of Apollo 11 Moonwalk and the loss of data. Richard L. Hess. July 17, 2009.

• Vigilant migration of data as new storage techniques become available is the only way to assure long-term preservation.
• We MUST be selective as to what we keep in our archives because if we keep everything we won’t be able to afford it–or find it. This is one of the key jobs that archivists do. However, blindly following retention practices, as was done by NASA for the IRIG Apollo 11 tapes, needs to be tempered by historians as well.
• In a generation (or less) if we save everything, it will become an overwhelming burden and the high points will be lost if they are not properly indexed.

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How to Choose a Digital Preservation Strategy: Evaluating a Preservation Planning Procedure.

Stephan Strodl, et al. Vienna University of Technology. 2007.

There is a variety of tools to support preservation strategies such as migration or emulation, which are the most prominent. But different preservation requirements across institutions make it very difficult to decide which to implement. The PLANETS approach offers a standardized way of planning and evaluating preservation strategies. This describes the workflow for evaluating and selecting digital preservation solutions following these principles. Preservation Planning has become a crucial decision process. It involves evaluating preservation strategies and tools, and choosing what is most appropriate. This is the “most difficult part in digital preservation endeavours”. The workflow includes:

• Define the basis, the collection, types and numbers of records, legal issues, environment...
• Choose the records that represent the variety of the collection
• Identify the requirements, characteristics, costs, measurements, etc.
• Define and describe alternatives, different solutions, tools, etc
• Perform the experiment which includes multiple stages