Strategies to Sustain Digitized Special Collections: Ithaka S+R/ARL Web Seminar Video and Q&A Online. Vigilantes of Montana poster, courtesy American Antiquarian SocietyMuseums and libraries are taking advantage of advances in technology to move their rare and unique collections online. What most institutions learn quickly is that digitization is the easy part. As grant funding rarely covers ongoing operations, the larger challenge is to develop a successful strategy to make sure the digitized collections remain accessible and relevant over time.
In January 2014, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Ithaka S+R offered a free web seminar that brought together leaders of the eight cases profiled in the recent study funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Searching for Sustainability: Strategies from Eight Digitized Special Collections. Video of the web seminar is now available on ARL’s YouTube channel. The Association of Research Libraries ( is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Brian Schottlaender Takes Ecosystem View of Digital Preservation. Brian E. C. SchottlaenderThe latest issue of Library Resources & Technical Services features a guest editorial by Brian E. C. Schottlaender, the Audrey Geisel university librarian at University of California, San Diego, and an ARL Board member. In “The Digital Preservation Imperative: An Ecosystem View,” Schottlaender highlights the increasingly urgent need to preserve the digital record as more and more scholarly, cultural, and governmental information is produced in digital form.
Schottlaender observes that digital assets are more fragile than their analog counterparts, mainly because they are more dynamic, noting that “[t]he most immediate and significant consequence of the dynamic nature of digital information resources is that their preservation calls for a much more active process than that required for analog resources.” He also notes that digital resources are more complex than analog materials, and states, When the Data hits the Fan!: Remembering Revolutionaries - Mandela, Tutu, Tony Benn and the Women's Library. The last 2 weeks have been busy with remembering those who have made a revolutionary change to our lives. This post considers the way we remember the lives of Nelson Mandela and Tony Benn, and the revolutionary lives and history of women contained in the Women's Library. I was lucky enough to attend the Service at Westminster Abbey to celebrate the life and work of Nelson Mandela.
It was a wonderful way to remember him and the highlights were the Soweto Choir and Archbishop Desmond Tutu's speech (more below). There is an active digital approach to remembering related to Mandela. The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory is to quote them is the "Nelson Mandela Digital Archive Project. Our aim is to locate, document, digitise, and provide access to all archival materials related to Nelson Mandela. Desmond Tutu in his wonderful speech stated: "Madiba was appalled by this vicious system [Apartheid] and it was for this noble resistance that he and many others were incarcerated for life.
- California Preservation Program. Digital Preservation. American Library Association Minimum Digitization Capture Recommendations (June 2012 draft) A document created as a guideline for libraries digitizing materials with the goal of not having to re-digitize materials at a later date. Archives Outside: Digitising Your Collection A five part blog that focuses on collections about New South Wales, but provides good information about project planning, technical specifications, handling materials, creating metadata and providing access Association of Research Libraries Digital Curation for Preservation (part of New Roles for New Times: An ARL Report Series in Development) Report focuses on how digital curation must be an integral part of the preservation of materials at research institutions.
California Digital Library Library of Congress National Digital Stewardship Alliance Smithsonian Institution Archives. Combined feeds about digital preservation. Digital Preservation Matters. Tessella - Digital Preservation - Digital Preservation. Digital preservation is a new and emerging discipline that presents huge opportunities for easy access to important information for long term knowledge management and legal support. However, it poses a large number of unexpected challenges that are artefacts of the digital age. Any archiving activity must start with a clear understanding of why you are archiving and what you need to archive as a result. Paper archives offer valuable lessons in best archival practice and this is expanded by the development of new reference models such as the Open Archival Information System now adopted as an ISO standard.
There are many alternatives available, many of which are not true archival solutions. Identifying Threats to Successful Digital Preservation: the SPOT Model for Risk Assessment | Kennisbank audiovisuele archivering. Scientific Data Lost to Poor Archiving. The problem isn’t insurmountable, though, and Vines suggests that both publishers and funding institutions from universities to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) could improve record keeping and data sharing just by raising their own standards and expectations for researchers when it comes to archiving data.
“At the moment, the scientific community doesn’t think about this,” said Vines. “There’s zero expectation that you could get the data from an older study. I think we’re missing a vast opportunity there.” When data from older research is not available, opportunities to do meta-analysis research—studies that look at multiple studies on a single topic and can provide new insights from old material—are lost. And data that might be useful to researchers in the future—figures on climate and weather, for example—can be lost entirely, leaving gaps in the research record.
The problem isn’t that the data isn’t backed up at all, said Vines, but how that backup is handled. Digital Landfill - Overcoming Information Chaos. A new generation of cloud-based content sharing tools has emerged, demonstrating how much simpler it can be to share files with any partner or outside team, either by storing them in a common-access area in the cloud, or by synchronizing content between two computers or devices via the cloud. Most of these “file share and sync” applications have adopted a “mobile first” approach. Along the way, some added social elements such as comment streams and shared wikis. Given their “easy start” approach, these services have been readily adopted as a way for project teams to share and communicate - frequently operating under the radar of the IT department. Many on-premise collaboration and content management system suppliers have responded by establishing cloud-only versions of their product, or extending their on-premise system into a hybrid cloud model.
Others allow these new cloud collaboration services to synchronize back to established on-premise ECM systems. The Art of Google Books Scans. “It was while looking at Google’s scan of the Dewey Decimal Classification system that I saw my first one—the hand of the scanner operator completely obscuring the book’s table of contents,” writes the artist Benjamin Shaykin. What he saw disturbed him: it was a brown hand resting on a page of a beautiful old book, its index finger wrapped in a hot-pink condom-like covering.
In the page’s lower corner, a watermark bore the words “Digitized by Google.” There are several collections of Google hands around the Web, each one as creepy as the one Shaykin saw. A small but thriving subculture is documenting Google Books’ scanning process, in the form of Tumblrs, printed books, photographs, online videos, and gallery-based installations. Something new is happening here that brings together widespread nostalgia for paperbound books with our concerns about mass digitization. The obsession with digital errors in Google Books arises from the sense that these mistakes are permanent, on the record.
Conversations about Digital Preservation (Podcasts) About Digital Preservation A production of the Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives and the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program The mission of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program is to develop a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available digital content for current and future generations. Collaboration and shared ideas are essential to the success of NDIIPP and all digital preservation institutions. These podcasts are conversations with digital preservation leaders with whom the Library is collaborating. Read more about the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. Conversations about Digital Preservation Podcasts Listen to Podcast Listen to Podcast Listen to Podcast Title: Mike Wash, National Archives and Record Administration Description: Mike Wash is chief information officer of the National Archives and Record Administration.
Listen to Podcast Listen to Podcast. Can digital data last forever? The National Archives in College Park, Md., has enough records from federal agencies to stretch 30,000 feet. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) In mid-1799 while ransacking Egypt, Napoleon and his army stumbled on a stone with three different languages chiseled into its face.
Measuring about 4 feet high and broken at the top, the 2,000-plus-year stone proved to be a dramatic find. Not only was it prized for its historical value, but the stone also helped decipher ancient Egyptian language. Now, 214 years later, the Rosetta Stone still holds the marks inscribed into it. Which begs the questions: What will happen to our data today in 2,000 years or even 100 years? In December 2010, the Obama administration unveiled the cloud-first policy. In essence, the cloud will be the main way the government keeps its data. When “the cloud” comes to mind, one tends to think of data floating into space and staying there safely, forever, never to be bothered unless someone calls on it.
What it’s on are servers. Connecting to Collections Online Community. Releases Fixity and MDQC, Digital Preservation Tools | AVPreserve. AVPreserve is pleased to announce the release of Fixity and MDQC, two new digital preservation tools available for free download on our Tools page. Fixity is a free open source utility for the documentation and regular review of stored files. Fixity scans a folder or directory, creating a manifest of the files including their file paths and their checksums, against which a regular comparative analysis can be run. Fixity monitors file integrity through generation and validation of checksums, and file attendance through monitoring and reporting on new, missing, moved and renamed files. AVPreserve created Fixity after coming to the realization that: 1.
Checksum generation and validation are universally recognized as a primary mechanism for fulfilling the goal of fixity. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. There are many free and open source checksum utilities out on the market but they do not offer the feature set or simplicity necessary to fulfill the need that organizations have. Digital Preservation (Library of Congress) Digital Collections and Services: Access to print, pictorial and audio-visual collections and other digital services. Historic Newspapers Enhanced access to America's historic newspapers through the Chronicling America project. Historic Sound Recordings The National Jukebox features over 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Co. between 1900 and 1925.
Performing Arts Collections, articles and special presentations on music, theater and dance materials from the Performing Arts Encyclopedia. Prints and Photographs Catalog of about half of the Library's pictorial holdings with over 1 million digital images. Veterans History Project Experience first-person stories of wartime service through personal artifacts, audio and video interviews. Releases Fixity and MDQC, Digital Preservation Tools | AVPreserve. Forthcoming Events. Teaching Librarians & Project Management: New Expectations for the Digital Age - Archive Journal Issue 3. Librarians have long been critical collaborators with their faculty in higher-education classroom settings, teaching research-education principles and providing one-on-one help with students to locate and evaluate sources for research projects. Until recently, most of these student projects have been research papers of varying lengths; each writing experience is a solo project that leads students to monkish behavior in solitary library carrels and dorm rooms.
Today’s students have new opportunities to apply critical thinking and research skills in transformative digital and collaborative projects. At Harvard, for example, students in an African and African American Studies course recently created digital stories about music, language, and digital media in former Portuguese colonies. This type of venture requires a different level of support from and collaboration with librarians who work in classroom settings. Skills for Teaching Librarians & Archivists in the Digital Age. Gov-info: NARA, NLM, & LOC Gov Resource: Digital... | Turning the Book Wheel.
Conversations about Digital Preservation (Podcasts) Connecting to Collections Online Community | About. Preservation Department: Lecture Series | Yale University Library. Preservation Lecture Series Past Lectures: Thursday, April 19, 3:30 pm Sterling Memorial Library lecture hall Mary M. Brooks, PhD, FIIC, ACR, Private Conservator and Consultant on the conservation of textiles Please click here to play the audio file of the presentation. The first three Preservation Lectures were funded through the generous donation of the Hon. "But Storage is Cheap!... Abby Smith Rumsey, Director, Scholarly Communication Institute Lecture in the Sterling Memorial Library on Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 3:30 p.m. Please click here to watch this lecture.
"Paradoxes of Preservation—a personal & strategic perspective on crossing the pond" Helen Shenton, former Head of Collection Care at the British Library, current Deputy Director at Harvard University Library. A lecture from November 11, 2010 Please click here to watch this lecture. "Sustainable Stewardship: The New Thinking, Preservation Environments, and Building Operations" James J. A lecture from April 7, 2010. Preservation Department: Lecture Series | Yale University Library.
It Takes a Village to Save a Hard Drive | In the final days of the XFR STN exhibition at the New Museum, we encountered what was hands-down the most challenging born-digital recovery to have occured during the run of the exhibition. On August 30th, artist Phil Sanders arrived at the New Museum with an amalgam floppy disks, and two external hard disk drives. XFR STN technician Kristin MacDonough went into production mode with recovering the floppy disks. In just a few hours Kristin was able to recover 146 of Phil’s floppy disks. Prolific! While Kristin tended to the sea of floppy disks, I investigated the hard drive situation.
The first external disk drive was a peripheral used with an Amiga. Luckily the drive inside was just a standard 3.5″ SCSI hard disk. The next external hard disk drive, originally used with an Apple //e, was a wholly different scenario. Phil’s hard drive is pictured above on the right. Initially, nothing happened. Phil’s memory had been accurate. Amazingly… it worked! It Takes a Village to Save a Hard Drive | Metadata and your Big Data? | Saving Video Games at The Strong. About us | Digital bevaring. SPRUCE Digital Preservation Illustrations - wiki.dpconline.org. Wiki.dpconline.org. Connecting to Collections Online Community | About. Overview. OAIS Activities. CoSA - Pocket Response Plan (PReP) Definitions of Digital Preservation | Assn. for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) Future of Information Alliance. WorldWideWebSize.com | The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet)
DPOE. Digital Preservation Management Workshops and Tutorial | dpworkshop.org. Digital Preservation Outreach Education.