'Oh, you wanted us to preserve that?!' Statements of Preservation Intent for the National Library of Australia's Digital Collections

'Oh, you wanted us to preserve that?!' Statements of Preservation Intent for the National Library of Australia's Digital Collections. Colin Webb, David Pearson, Paul Koerbin. National Library of Australia. D-Lib Magazine. January/February 2013.
Clarifying preservation intentions is likely to be a good starting point for preservation planning for diverse digital collections. This applies both in terms of identifying what needs to be kept and what does not warrant the use of limited preservation resources, and in terms of opening up conversations about what is required in order to achieve preservation intentions. This paper describes an approach being explored by the National Library of Australia to negotiate formal and reviewable statements of 'preservation intent' for each of the digital collections in its care with those responsible for those collections. The paper looks at the relationship with the widely discussed concept of 'significant properties', as well as the other benefits that the approach is delivering. The paper also looks at the preservation intent statements for archived web collections at the NLA as an illustrative case.

The approach described in this paper is based on a conviction that methods and solutions in digital preservation do not exist in a policy vacuum. Rather, they are only meaningfully discussed as solutions to problems that threaten or frustrate the organisation's explicit access intentions.
This approach still refers to significant properties as a critical part of the preservation planning process. We believe it puts the full identification and evaluation of significant properties into a more useful context: that is, being later in the decision-making process.
At the very least, we aim to be in a position to know whether preservation action will be needed and whether a bit-level preservation copy will be good enough when access to content is lost.
As with most preservation processes, evaluating and articulating preservation intentions is likely to be an ongoing process requiring proactive management and periodic review. Our current conception of it still requires further development but it has given the NLA a useful start in real preservation planning.

Without some kind of understanding between curators and preservers, we are doomed to recurring nasty surprises based on mismatched expectations.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Challenges of Dumping/Imaging old IDE Disks

Challenges of Dumping/Imaging old IDE Disks. Dirk von Suchodoletz. Open Planets. 20 March 2013.
Full system preservation through imaging or processing in digital forensics depend on reliable hardware-software stacks for identity system disk migrations. There are a number of pitfalls which might prevent authentic copies of the original components to an image file. The article discusses issues with disk recognition, reading and verification. The tool of choice to produce identical copies of block devices in Linux/Unix systems is dd.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage

The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage. Benj Edwards. The Atlantic. Mar 15 2013.
The anti-circumvention section (1201) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act needs to be repealed. The law threatens consumer control over the electronic devices we buy, but if the DMCA remains unaltered, cultural scholarship will soon be conducted only at the behest of corporations, and public libraries may disappear entirely. The DMCA prevents sharing information and sharing is vital to  preserve information. To properly preserve digital works, libraries and archives must be able to copy and media-shift them without fear of legal problems. The provisions in the DCMA are unacceptable and must change, or as a society we must be willing to say goodbye to libraries and the concept of universal public access to knowledge.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Training in Digital Preservation - Alliance for Permanent Access

Training in Digital Preservation - Alliance forPermanent Access. William Kilbride, Chiara Cirinnà, Sharon McMeekiny. 21 February 2013. [PDF] 
This paper summarizes the current digital preservation needs based on the APARSEN project.
The need for training is great and the resources available are relatively meagre: so there is an
opportunity to collaborate in order to maximise impact.  In the training courses that have taken place there were four themes consistently expressed in feedback:

1. There is a great demand for training from staff already engaged in library and archive settings, especially for introductory material.
2. Audiences welcomed practical, case-study based training that matched their needs over theoretical knowledge. Tools and services beyond their level of knowledge or which lacked practical application were also less popular.
3. The audiences wanted practical interaction with preservation processes, including trying out the tools for themselves.
4. Audiences did not feel the need  to have a complete overview of preservation before they got started, and were less interested in the theoretical which they saw as a hindrance.

 However, training could be popular but still leave significant gaps so training should not just be based on the feedback.  The report gives many recommendations for training for Operational Staff,
Operational Managers, and Senior Managers regarding standards, object life-cycles, practical experience, legal and policy frameworks, ingest, provenance, metadata, financial planning, user communities, and succession planning.  They point to a very large unmet training need and a long list of topics which training providers can actually provide.

By developing training that meets proven needs we can provide a strong foundation to
an ever larger and ever more diverse community.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

The cost of doing nothing

The cost of doing nothing. Barbara Sierman. Digital Preservation Seeds. maart 11, 2013.

There has been much discussion on the fact that over the years the digital preservation community has created more than a dozen cost models, which may increase the confusion in digital preservation even bigger. May be this is part of the way things are going: everyone sees his own situation as something special with special needs.

The solution? Creating an existing model or developing a new one. We can expect help from the recently started European project 4C ,”The Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation”. In their introduction they state that “4C reminds us that the point of this investment [in digital preservation] is to realise a benefit”. Less emphasis on the complexity of digital preservation, and more on the benefits. If we have better figures of the benefits of preserving digital material, we are in a better position to estimate what it will cost us if digital materials are not preserved.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Libraries, Hackspaces and E-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution

Libraries, Hackspaces and E-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution. Cory Doctorow. Raincoast Books.  February 24, 2013.
The problem with people who say "What do we need libraries for? We've got the Internet now!" is that they have confused a library with a book depository. "Now, those are useful, too, but a library isn't just (or even necessarily) a place where you go to get books for free." Libraries have always been places where skilled information professionals have helped people understand the world.

Librarians have been selecting credible books, cataloging and shelving them, and then assisting patrons in understanding how to synthesize the material in them. Libraries have been hubs where the curious, the entrepreneurs, the scholarly and others could gather in the company of one another, surrounded by untold information-wealth, professionals who could lend technical assistance where needed. "All these people were using the library as a place, a resource, and a community. Because that's what libraries are. And we've never needed that more than we need it today." Now we're *drowning* in information. We live in a "publish, then select" world: everyone can reach everything, all the time, and the job of experts is to collect and annotate that material, to help others navigate its worth and truthfulness. Society has never needed its librarians, and its libraries, more. The major life-skill of the information age is information literacy, and no one's better at that than librarians. It's what they train for. It's what they live for.

But there's another group of information-literate people out there who are a natural ally of libraries and librarians: the makers who build physical stuff. "They make robots, flying drones, 3D printers (and 3D printed stuff), jewelry, tools, printing presses, clothes,... Today's tinkerer work in vast, distributed communities where information sharing is the norm, where the ethics and practices of the free/open source software movement has gone physical. " We need to master computers — to master the systems of information, so that we can master information itself. Why not take surplused computers and components and make libraries "book-lined, computer-filled information-dojos where communities come together to teach each other black-belt information literacy, where initiates work alongside noviates to show them how to master the tools of the networked age from the bare metal up."
"Only through understanding the tools of information can we master them, and only by mastering them can we use them to make our lives better, rather than destroying them."

 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Chemists.

Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Chemists.  February 25, 2013. Matthew P. Long, Roger C. Schonfeld. Ithaka S+R. February 26, 2013. [PDF]

This report, intended for those who support chemists, including librarians, is about the latest research methods, practices, and information services needs of academics chemists. Chemists need services to make their lives easier and their research groups more productive; this includes minimizing paperwork and administrative tasks. They value academic libraries primarily for the access that they provide to electronic journals and other online resources. Researchers are often frustrated by an inability to share large amounts of data with a collaborator. Few chemists visit the physical library, but they use the library digital collections heavily.

In the survey, fewer than 10% reported a research consultation with a librarian, asked for help with a data management, or asked for assistance on an issue related to publishing in the past year; they rarely reach out to the library to discuss issues or request support. The main search sites for chemists are Web of Knowledge/Web of  Science, SciFinder, and PubMed. It would be helpful to have tools to help process all of this information,  a pre-scan of announcements from journals, and organize their materials. Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) make it easy to share, archive, and search through past lab notes, but are at risk in the lab. Labs generally do not have good data management infrastructure or proper external support for developing it, especially in sharing and preserving files.

It is difficult for academic chemists to coordinate the recording and preservation of data after the completion of a project. When data are saved, they are often held in unstable or at-risk formats  or in formats where no one else can access or interpret them. Sometimes a large amount of potentially useful data is not shared or preserved in any durable way. One chemist invited the library to come and speak to the department about preservation and access. Chemists have a general lack of awareness of  effective data curation and preservation. Data management and preservation is time-consuming and rarely straightforward; it requires expert advice and constant monitoring.

The findings:

1. Chemists need better support in data management, sharing and preservation.
2.  Many researchers remain anxious about keeping up with the newest literature.
3. They need new tools to stay aware of new research and also serendipitous discovery.
4. Chemists  require greater support in disseminating their research, including articles, data, and other materials.

Other areas of concern for academic chemists : laboratory management, gaining access to industrial funding, and teaching support.

We see some real potential for the academic library to stretch the definition of the services it offers to the academic chemist. The library may also have a role in working with other service providers and ensuring that academics are aware of the latest research tools. It is clear from this project that libraries must think strategically about whether and how to invest in services for chemists.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital Curation Bibliography

Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement. Charles W. Bailey, Jr. March 2013.

Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement, which presents over 130 English-language articles, books, and technical reports published in 2012 about digital curation and preservation, copyright issues, digital formats (e.g., media, e-journals, research data), metadata, models and policies, national and international efforts, projects and institutional implementations, research studies, services, strategies, and digital repository concerns.

It is a supplement to the Digital Curation Bibliography:Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, which covers over 650 works published from 2000 through 2011.

 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Adding Value to Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Institutional Repositories

Adding Value to Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Institutional Repositories. Joachim Schöpfel. D-Lib Magazine. March/April 2013.

This paper looks at the differences with institutional repositories that contain electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs, particularly regarding metadata, policy, access restrictions, representativeness, file format, status, quality and related services. The intent is to improve the  "quality of content and service provision in an open environment, in order to increase impact, traffic and usage". This paper shows five ways in which institutions can add value to the deposit and dissemination of electronic theses and dissertation:

1. Quality of content. A good IR not only defines a set of standards and criteria for the selection and validation of deposits but also communicates and promotes this editorial policy.
2. Metadata. The description of the content and context of the ETD files will make a difference. 
3. Format. The IR should contain full text, offer different file formats, and have deposit formats are searchable, open, and appropriate for long-term preservation and use of the content.
4. Repositories should network and interconnect.
5. Provide needed services beyond basic searching, viewing, and downloading. Some possibilities are discussion forums, usage statistics and metrics, citations, Print On Demand in book format, copyright protection or Creative Commons licensing, and preservation. 

 Institutional Repositories must also be future-oriented and anticipate future transformation of scientific communication. "It is crucial for the success of a repository that the institution clearly defines its objectives in line with its scientific strategy and environment. "

 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Score Model

Score Model. Website. Digitaal Erfgoed Nederland, PACKED. 2013.

This score model guides you through the risks and threats to digital materials. It has a series of questions that create a report that points out the strong and weaker points of your digital organization. The report provides recommendations in order to minimise the risks are provided where possible.

The tool is intended especially for small and medium heritage organizations, but anyone who is managing a digital collection and has a concern about its sustainability can use the Score model.

These risks are grouped in seven clusters:

1. Organisation and policy: does the preservation of digital files fit the structure and policy of your organisation?
2. Preservation strategy: is it correctly recorded what is being preserved, for whom and in what manner?
3. Expertise and organisation: is the right expertise present in your institution and it it put to good use?
4. Storage management: is the physical storage of the digital files also reliable?
5. Ingest: are the right measures taken whenever a digital object is ingested into your storage system?
6. Planning and control: is the management well prepared? Are all actions retraceable?
7. Access: is access to the digital files properly regulated?
    
   
   Digital Preservation Matters.

How big is the sound of music?

How big is the sound of music?  Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. March 21, 2013. 

Recently audiophiles and musicians have been moving toward master-quality music that's playable from a hard drive. That has led to greater use of lossless file formats. A popular file format, or codec, is the MP3.  This is a compressed file format; it is referred to as "lossy," meaning data is lost in the translation from the original master to the compressed format. Analog audio is recorded by sampling it 44,100 times per second, and then the samples are used to reconstruct the audio signal when playing it back digitally. An uncompressed file on a CD for example, uses 44.1KHz or a 1,411Kbits of data per second (Kbps) while a compressed file may only offer a bit rate of up to 256Kbps, which results in lower quality.  Within file formats, there are many sampling rates or frequencies; the higher the sampling rate, the higher the sound quality.

Uncompressed files are often stored as WAV files (Waveform Audio File Format), which can typically be 10 - 40 times larger than MP3 files.Other lossless formats include FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) and Apple's ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec). These lossless file formats require less storage space than WAV files. These new lossless formats can save disk space and offer high-fidelity music playback. For example, an album in the WAV format make take up 640 MB of space; the same album would take up about 300 MB in the lossless FLAC format. And lossy MP3 file would take up about 60 MB. It is estimated that CDs only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track; when that CD is further compressed into a lossy MP, even more depth and quality of a recording is lost.

A relatively new high-definition file format, called Direct-Stream Digital (DSD), was created by Sony and Philips.  DSD uses a sample rate of 2.8224MHz or 64 times that of a CD's 41.1KHz.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Establishing a Digital Preservation Policy

Establishing a Digital Preservation Policy. JISC. March 2013.
Rapid advances in technology can lead to digital collections becoming obsolete very quickly and a digital preservation policy is a crucial part of managing this risk. Digital preservation can be a costly process and will need continual attention well after all materials have been digitised and ingested into a collection. The digital preservation policy should highlight an organisation's ongoing commitment to digitally preserving valuable collections.

Digital preservation and digitization, though related, are distinct activities. The preservation of digital resources continues long after a digitization project has been completed. Digital preservation is not a time-limited process.

A preservation policy should be directly connected to the aims and goals of the institution. Clearly establishing the benefits of a digital preservation strategy at an early stage will allow these benefits to be measured and show the need for commitment by the institution. Implementing a preservation policy may only be possible by first raising awareness of the benefits of digital preservation and the potential dangers of ignoring it.

Strong policies should also be inclusive and cross-departmental. Creating a policy at an early stage may provide a basic digital preservation policy, which can then be developed as required. Tying in high-level policy documents can be especial beneficial when quantifying the benefits of preservation.

When an institution is digitizing content, it is important that a digital preservation policy is implemented as soon as possible. A best practice is to have a preservation strategy in place before any content is digitized so that standards are followed. However, a phased introduction may be necessary, perhaps beginning with the needs of the digitization project and evolving to embrace the needs of the institution.

A digital preservation policy should include:

• An explanation of how the policy relates to other organisational goals, objectives and mission statements. This section should also quantify the benefits of a sustainable digital collection.
• How the digital preservation policy sits along side other institutional policies, such as records management, IT or digitisation work. It should also highlight the use of agreed upon and interoperable standards.
• The objectives of preservation activities, this section should outline how activities mentioned in the principle statement will be undertaken and by whom. Will preservation actions be carried out in-house or outsourced? For how long will materials be 
• preserved?
• Detail of just how digital preservation will be implemented. Which department will undertake what activities and when? Objectives of the policy should be spelled out in practical terms.
• The scope of preservation activities should also be made clear. What will be preserved? Will you undertake to store ‘archival masters' only or multiple versions of a file? In detailed policies, preferred file formats should also be listed.
• Accountability. Who, ultimately will be responsible for digital preservation within an organisation? How will the organisation fund staff training, equipment, outsourcing, and storage. Who will be responsible for future changes to the digitisation strategy? Signing-off an agreed policy could help its long-term prospects.
• Glossary: Anyone unfamiliar with digital preservation may require a detailed glossary.
• Version Control: Date of policy. It's status and review date should also be included.

A preservation policy must be aware of ongoing digital preservation costs and that the costs will vary by collection. 

The sooner the issues associated with digital preservation are addressed, the easier it will be to develop hands-on preservation procedures to ensure preservation objectives are met. A digital preservation policy is required for digitization projects, but more so for the long-term management and maintenance of digital collections.
 

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.

Writing a Digital Preservation Business Case (a case study)

Writing a Digital Preservation Business Case (a case study). Paul Wheatley. SPRUCE. Dec 19, 2012.

A project looking at the organization's digital files and writing a business case for a library environment.  Some of the activities included surveys, creating a retention schedule, a preservation metadata schema, and naming convention. This includes a checklist for writing a business case. 

1. Research the context so that it fits the organizations strategic priorities and policies
2. What needs to be achieved; aim at a specific goal
3. Calculating costs for storage, software and services
4. Writing the business case; what is to be achieved, the options, benefits, risks, roles
5. Reviewing the business case

Digital Preservation Matters.

LTO-6 tape with up to 6.25TB capacity ships.

LTO-6 tape with up to 6.25TB capacity ships. Lucas Mearian. Computerworld. November 26, 2012.
Tape media and drive companies have begun shipping the sixth generation of linear-tape open (LTO) technology, which like previous generation upgrades, significantly increases the capacity and data throughput capabilities for backup and archive applications.

LTO-6 cartridges can hold up to 2.5TB natively or 6.25TB of compressed data. Compared with previous generation LTO-5 drives and cartridges, the new LTO-6 cartridges more than double capacity (with compression) and offer a 40% performance boost. LTO-5 held up to 1.5TB natively and 3TB of compressed data. The LTO-5 drives had a native data transfer rate of 200MBps or up to 1TB per hour with 2:1 compression. LTO-6 tapes also include encryption and WORM (write-once, read many) capabilities that were also offered with the past two generations of LTO tape drives and media.

LTO-6 drives will provide backward compatibility with the ability to read and write LTO-5 cartridges and read LTO-4 generation cartridges.

Digital Preservation Matters.

128TB tape cartridges key to kilometer-size telescope

128TBtape cartridges key to kilometer-size telescope. Computerworld. Lucas Mearian. December 6, 2012.

In one day, the telescope's dishes will generate 10 times the network traffic produced at the same time on the global Internet. They will feed about 10 petabits of data (1 billion gigabits) per second into a central computer that will have the processing power of about 100 million of today's PCs.  The project plans to generate 1 million GB of data per day and store 300 to 1,500 petabytes (1.5 exabytes) of data per year. IBM is responsible for the data storage and they plan to use tape. "The tape will be used as a deep archive." Construction is expected to start in 2016 and take four years. The exascale supercomputer is expected to be completed by 2024.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Identifying Threats to Successful Digital Preservation: the SPOT Model for Risk Assessment

Identifying Threats to Successful Digital Preservation: the SPOT Model for Risk Assessment. Sally Vermaaten, Brian Lavoie, Priscilla Caplan.  D-Lib Magazine. September/October 2012.

A successful digital preservation strategy accounts for and lessens the impact of various threats to the digital materials over time. Typologies of threats are practical tools that can aid in the development of preservation strategies. This paper proposes the Simple Property-Oriented Threat (SPOT) Model for Risk Assessment. It defines six essential properties of successful digital preservation.

1. Available for long-term use.
2. Identity allows an object to be discovered and retrieved.
3.  Persistence means objects are intact and can be read from the storage media.
4. Renderability is that the object can be used and retain the significant characteristics. 
5. Understandable by its intended users.
6. Authenticity in that it is what it purports to be.

This model is intended to provide a framework to carry out a risk assessment on the repository contents. Use of the model can help repositories identify previously unaddressed threats, perform ongoing monitoring of key threats, and demonstrate that a repository complies with accepted standards by appropriately managing risks.

Digital preservation threats can be divided into two categories:

1. threats to archived digital content, and 
2. threats to the custodial organization itself.

 The SPOT Model is intended to be a practical tool for repository managers to help identify the sources of risk and develop strategies to mitigate these risks over time. It can be a checklist for identifying threats.
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Data Conservancy Instance: Infrastructure and Organizational Services for Research Data Curation

The Data Conservancy Instance: Infrastructure and Organizational Services for Research Data Curation. Matthew S. Mayernik, et al. D-Lib Magazine. September/October 2012.
Digital research data can only be managed and preserved over time through a sustained institutional commitment. Digital research data, if curated and made broadly available, promise to enable researchers to ask new kinds of questions and use new kinds of analytical methods in the study of critical scientific and societal issues. 

The Data Conservancy, a community organized around data curation research, technology development, and community building, is driven by a common theme: the need for institutional solutions to digital research data collection, curation and preservation challenges.
The four main activities of the Data Conservancy are:

1. A focused research program to examine research practices across multiple disciplines in order to understand the data curation tools and services needed to support interdisciplinary research
2. An infrastructure development program for data management and curation services
3. Data curation educational and professional development programs 
4. Development of sustainability models for long term data curation.

Data curation solutions for research institutions must address both technical and organizational challenges. These include context, hardware and software infrastructure, services, and sustainable strategy.

The features needed include a preservation-ready system, customizable user interfaces, flexible data model, ingest and search interface,  and data examination processes.

The Big Picture: Preserving Audio & Video Digital Media.

Managing and Preserving Audio and Video in your Digital Repository. DuraSpace. Oct 6, 2012. 

The DuraSpace site has a series of webinars dealing with preserving audio and video files.  The above link is to the overview of the webinars. To watch the webinars, use the links below.

1.        The Big Picture: Preserving Audio and Video Digital Media. Webinar. DuraSpace.  May 16, 2012.

Analog migration choices and digital migration formats; storage and retrieval, codecs, techniques for data reduction and compression, media containers.

2.       Creating Access to Audio and Video Digital Media: The Variations on Video Project and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Adam Wead, Jon Dunn. June 6, 2012.  

Storage solutions, advantages and disadvantages; tools; PBCore; Wowza with Flowplater; costs and limitations; creating an open source solution.

3.       Describing Audio and Video Digital Media with Metadata. Kara Van Malssen, Chris Beer.  June 13, 2012.

Need provenance and technical metadata; broadcast wave format; embed metadata in files; know the source; understand what you have.

Digital Preservation Matters.