An Information Life-Cycle Approach: Best Practices for Digital Archiving This article appeared first in the January 2000 issue of D-Lib Magazine, Volume 6 Number 1. As we move into the electronic era of digital objects it is important to know that there are new barbarians at the gate and that we are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages; consequently, much as monks of times past, it falls to librarians and archivists to hold to the tradition which reveres history and the published heritage of our times. - Terry Kuny, XIST/Consultant, National Library of Canada [Kuny 1998] The rapid growth in the creation and dissemination of digital objects by authors, publishers, corporations, governments, and even librarians, archivists, and museum curators, has emphasized the speed and ease of short-term dissemination with little regard for the long-term preservation of digital information. The Background of the ICSTI Study
Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement In a rapidly changing technological environment, the difficult task of ensuring long-term access to digital information is increasingly important. The Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement presents over 130 English-language articles, books, and technical reports published in 2012 that are useful in understanding digital curation and preservation. This selective bibliography covers digital curation and preservation copyright issues, digital formats (e.g., media, e-journals, and 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. The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. ———. ———.
Research Information Should we be prepared to face a future without digital curation? A new digital curation centre in the UK will help research institutions to safeguard research data for years to come. Peter Burnhill, the centre's interim director, reports ...It's 2020. Searching the web for evidence to support her choice of topic, however, leads to a frustrating conclusion. The importance of data Scientists and researchers generate increasing amounts of digital data, and investment is being made into further digitisation and purchase of digital content and information. The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the academic community have taken note of this issue and invested in a number of scoping studies to find a solution. Now, building on that work and the expertise already existing in particular disciplines, a Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is being launched. Data forms the evidential base for scholarly conclusions, and for the validation of those conclusions.
Digital Curation Blog Digital Preservation Service Provider Models for Institutional Repositories: Towards Distributed Services Abstract Digital preservation can encompass a range of activities, from simple replication and storage to more complex transformation, depending on the assessed value and risk to the target content. These activities require planning and, in most cases, begin with a need to know the technical format of the target content. In this case, the target is the content deposited in institutional repositories (IRs). The Preserv project [1] set out to investigate the use of The National Archives' (TNA) PRONOM-DROID service (PRONOM is the online registry of technical information; DROID is the downloadable file format identification tool) for file format identification on two pilot IRs using EPrints software, and instead produced format profiles (Preserv profiles) of over 200 repositories presented via the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Introduction How are institutional repositories (IRs) to preserve the digital content for which they accept responsibility? What is 'preservation'?
Avoiding a Digital Dark Age Data longevity depends on both the storage medium and the ability to decipher the information Kurt D. Bollacker When I was a boy, I discovered a magnetic reel-to-reel audio tape recorder that my father had used to create “audio letters” to my mother while he was serving in the Vietnam War. A decade later in the 1980s I was in high school making backups of the hard drive of my PC onto 5-¼-inch floppy disks. The Dead Sea scrolls, made out of still-readable parchment and papyrus, are believed to have been created more than 2,000 years ago. Over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st, an increasing proportion of the information we create and use has been in the form of digital data. Sending... Your email has been sent Enter the words above:Incorrect please try again
Digital Preservation and Permanent Executive Summary 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Scope and Methodology 3.0 Highlighted Systems 4.0 Setting the Stage 4.1 Archiving Concepts and Definitions 4.2 The Scientific Environment 4.3 The Technological Environment 4.4 Scientific Publishing and Communications 4.4.1 Open Access 4.4.2 Institutional Respositories 4.5 Legal Deposit and Copyright 5.0 Stakeholder Roles 5.1 Publishers 5.2 National Libraries 5.3 Institutions 5.4 Museums 5.5 National, State and Regional Archives 5.6 Trusted Third Parties 5.7 The Role of Government 5.8 Foundations and Other Private Funding Source 6.0 Preservation by Document Type 6.1 Electronic Journals 6.2 Theses and Dissertations 6.3 Scientific Data Sets 6.4 Technical Reports 6.5 Conferences, Meetings and Lectures 6.6 E-Records 7.0 Standards by Format Type 7.1 Text 7.2 Images 7.3 Numeric Data 7.4 Video and Audio 7.5 Output from Design, Modeling and Visualization Tools 8.0 The Workflow 8.1 Selection Criteria 8.2 Metadata Creation 8.3 Archiving and Transformation 8.3.2 Migration 8.4 Storage
Svårt lagra digital information - DN.se Den digitala teknikens stora, okända svaghet är att det inte finns något säkert sätt att lagra digital information inför framtiden. En rad internationella projekt arbetar nu med att utveckla arkivbeständiga digitala lösningar. I Sverige leds arbetet från Boden. På Teknikvägen 3 i Boden hittar man Centrum för långsiktigt digitalt bevarande, LDB-centrum. Det finns nämligen inget säkert sätt att spara digitalt material för framtiden. Alla som talar om de spännande saker som kommer att hända med digital litteratur, film, musik och andra medier de närmaste åren borde börja svettas en aning. - Om du inte gör någonting på tjugo år med det du har lagt in på din senaste brända DVD, så garanterar jag att du inte kommer att kunna läsa den, säger Östen Jonsson, verksamhetsledare på LDB-centrum. Det tog två hundra år för Library of Congress att samla in sina 130 miljoner katalogposter - böcker, film, ljudinspelningar och annat. Ett par exempel visar vad vi kan vänta oss om vi inte gör något.
NDIIPP project partners meeting, day one I’m in Washington, DC for the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) grant partners meeting. NDIIPP is a program of the Library of Congress (LC), and we learned today that it has just been awarded permanent status in the federal budget. As a result, the program should receive an annual appropriation and become a permanent part of the digital preservation landscape. In response to this change, LC is thinking of creating a National Digital Stewardship Alliance (the name may change), which would allow current NDIIPP partners to continue working with LC and attract new partners. Organizations that are willing and able to direct resources to NDIIPP initiatives will have a voice in the operations of the alliance, and other interested institutions and individuals can become observers. I’ll be sure to post more information about this alliance as it becomes available. The Internet has enabled just about anyone who wishes to create media to do so.
'Digital dark age' could leave historians with no records of the 21st century - News - Gadgets and Tech Technology could mean that our lives are lost to history, according to experts. As the way that we store information about ourselves develops, memories stored in files that use older technology are becoming harder to access, Dr Vinton "Vint" Cerf, vice president of Google, has warned. That could mean that historians of the future are unable to learn about our lives, Cerf said. He compared the potential loss to the dark ages — the time after the Romans, about which little is known because there are few written records. Cerf recommended that users make physical copies of important documents, so that they will last into the future. "In our zeal to get excited about digitising we digitise photographs thinking it's going to make them last longer, and we might turn out to be wrong," he said. But even that might not work, since historians often don’t realise what the important documents of a time are until centuries after those that made them have died. Reuse content
Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job – The Message – Medium When this launched, there were dozens of confused comments from people wondering what old videogames has to do with Internet history. In my mind, this stems from mistaken perception issues of the Internet Archive as solely an institution saving webpages. But their mission and motto is much broader: Universal access to all knowledge. The Internet Archive is not Google. The Internet Archive is a chaotic, beautiful mess. But this software emulation project feels, to me, like the kind of thing Google would have tried in 2003. This effort is the perfect articulation of what makes the Internet Archive great — with repercussions for the future we won’t fully appreciate for years. But here’s a glimpse: last week, one of the JSMESS developers managed to get Netscape running on Windows 3.1 with functional networking. It’s not just about games — that’s just the hook. It’s about preserving our digital history, which as we know now, is as easy to delete as 15 years of GeoCities.
Your digital life after death – Medium “What happens to your digital presence after you die?” Only a short while ago, no one had to consider what would become of the long trail of personal data we leave all over the internet. Now, artist and TED Fellow Gabriel Barcia-Colombo (TED Talk: Capturing memories in video art) is using this data as raw material to generate high-tech memorials that bring back to life those we’ve lost — and spark a conversation about our virtual lives and death. With a grant from Art and Technology Lab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and working with what he calls “an artistic X-Men,” Barcia-Colombo created the Hereafter Institute, a fictional, futuristic funeral home that offers clients consultations for various high-tech options for leaving a digital legacy — from video lockets to vinyl pressings to data-driven custom funerals. Take a peek at what’s on offer. A very vinyl memorial. Because who needs a stone monument? What about meeting loved ones face to face?
Managing your digital records Most of us have moved into the digital world in order to work, communicate, take photos, and generally to run our lives. But the huge storage capacity of contemporary computers and other devices, and a sense of being too busy, mean that many people have chaotic personal digital archives, disorganised and prone to accidental loss. If our digital archivists could be angels on the shoulders of creators of digital content they would plead 4 messages. These things apply to everyone and will make your life easier when you are looking for information. And yes, if you transfer your archive to a collecting institution in the future your records will be in good shape. Home office 1. This is the simplest step. Be descriptive, but……keep it short. Ask yourself: In 50 years will I understand what the item is by the title—will I be able to find it? 2. Control baby! If there is one thing to fill an archivist’s heart with dread it is a pile of loose papers—what are they about? 3. 4.
The Internet Archive Turns 20: A Behind The Scenes Look At Archiving The Web Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and some of the Archive’s servers in 2006. (AP Photo/Ben Margot) To most of the web surfing public, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is the face of the Archive’s web archiving activities. Via a simple interface, anyone can type in a URL and see how it has changed over the last 20 years. Yet, behind that simple search box lies an exquisitely complex assemblage of datasets and partners that make possible the Archive’s vast repository of the web. How does the Archive really work, what does its crawl workflow look like, how does it handle issues like robots.txt, and what can all of this teach us about the future of web archiving? Perhaps the first and most important detail to understand about the Internet Archive’s web crawling activities is that it operates far more like a traditional library archive than a modern commercial search engine. There are likely many reasons for this architectural decision.