Long-term Digital Preservation Research Articles

Digital Preservation of Cultural and Historic Resources of India: The Role of Libraries and Government of India

Digital preservation means preservation and documentation of the original text with the help of information technology which facilitates greater access for scholars and researchers. Digital preservation ensures that each necessary component of the digital materials should be migrated, preserved or emulated. This paper makes an attempt to discuss the essence of digital preservation and the advantages of digital preservation over the same for the paper based media and the techniques used to preserve digital materials. The two long-term digital preservation approaches often encouraged by the archival and library preservation communities are migration and emulation. Familiarity with IT infrastructure, including hardware, software and web development, acquaintance about the methodology of digitization across from text to images, floppy disks to audio and video DVDs and key metadata standards used are the essential qualities of the person handling digital preservation. This paper also includes the different preservation activities taken by various Indian libraries and the Government of India.

Effects of specific key environmental factors on the life expectancy of optical data carriers

ABSTRACTIn recent years, the concept of content preservation rather than carrier preservation has become the norm with regard to long-term digital preservation. Nonetheless, the life expectancy of digital carriers is important because, in addition to other digital system parameters, it determines the migration time of digital content. In general, a cleaner, cooler, drier, and more stable environment extends the life expectancy, and appropriate protection of individual types of carriers is based on understanding the vulnerability of the carrier and consequently on providing optimal storage conditions and appropriate handling. This paper presents the effects of specific environmental factors (i.e., temperature, humidity, and light) on the life expectancy of physical digital recording media, with an emphasis on optical media. Although optical discs are just one of the various methods of digital data storage today, they continue to be a popular archive medium. It should be noted that optical discs are not permanent recording media, as is often wrongly believed, and that their life expectancy is significantly influenced by environmental factors. At the ZRC SAZU Institute of Ethnomusicology, an experiment was conducted to analyze the durability of digital records saved on CD-Rs that were exposed to light in everyday working conditions. The results showed that exposing recordable optical discs to light, especially direct sunlight, can result in complete destruction of the data recorded within a few days or weeks. This confirmed the importance of careful handling, appropriate storage, and regular testing of digital carriers.

Software preservation

ABSTRACTComtrade Ltd. covers a wide range of activities related to information and communication technologies; its deliverables include web applications, locally installed programs, system software, drivers, embedded software (used e.g. in medical devices, auto parts, communication switchboards). Also the extensive knowledge and practical experience about digital long-term preservation technologies have been acquired. This wide spectrum of activities puts us in the position to discuss the often overlooked aspect of the digital preservation – preservation of software programs. There are many resources dedicated to digital preservation of digital data, documents and multimedia records, but not so many about how to preserve the functionalities and features of computer programs. Exactly these functionalities – dynamic response to inputs – render the computer programs rich compared to documents or linear multimedia. The article opens the questions on the beginning of the way to the permanent digital preservation. The purpose is to find a way in the right direction, where all relevant aspects will be covered in proper balance. The following questions are asked: why at all to preserve computer programs permanently, who should do this and for whom, when we should think about permanent program preservation, what should be persevered (such as source code, screenshots, documentation, and social context of the program – e.g. media response to it ...), where and how? To illustrate the theoretic concepts given the idea of virtual national museum of electronic banking is also presented.

Towards Emulation-as-a-Service: Cloud Services for Versatile Digital Object Access

The changing world of IT services opens the chance to more tightly integrate digital long-term preservation into systems, both for commercial and end users. The emergence of cloud offerings re-centralizes services, and end users interact with them remotely through standardized (web-)client applications on their various devices. This offers the chance to use partially the same concepts and methods to access obsolete computer environments and allows for more sustainable business processes. In order to provide a large variety of user-friendly remote emulation services, especially in combination with authentic performance and user experience, a distributed system model and architecture is required, suitable to run as a cloud service, allowing for the specialization both of memory institutions and third party service providers.The shift of the usually non-trivial task of the emulation of obsolete software environments from the end user to specialized providers can help to simplify digital preservation and access strategies. Besides offering their users better access to their holdings, libraries and archives may gain new business opportunities to offer services to a third party, such as businesses requiring authentic reproduction of digital objects and processes for legal reasons. This paper discusses cloud concepts as the next logical step for accessing original digital material. Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) fills the gap between the successful demonstration of emulation strategies as a long term access strategy and it’s perceived availability and usability. EaaS can build upon the ground of research and prototypical implementations of previous projects, and reuse well established remote access technology.In this article we develop requirements and a system model, suitable for a distributed environment. We will discuss the building blocks of the core services as well as requirements regarding access management. Finally, we will try to present a business model and estimate costs to implement and run such a service. The implementations of EaaS will influence future preservation planning in memory institutions, as it shifts the focus on object access workflows.

On the Role of Research Data Centres in the Management of Publication-Related Research Data

This paper summarizes the findings of an analysis among scientific infrastructure service providers. These service providers have been evaluated in regard to their potential services for the management of publication-related research data. By conducting a desk research and an online survey, we found out that almost three quarters of all responding research data centres, archives and libraries generally store externally generated research data – what also applies to publication-related data. Almost 75% of all respondents also store and host the code of computation (the syntax of statistical analyses). If self-written software components have been used to generate research outputs, only 40% of all respondents accept these software components for storing and hosting. Eight in ten institutions also stated that they are taking specific actions for digital long-term preservation of their data. In regard to the documentation of stored and hosted research data almost 70% of all respondents claimed to use the metadata schema of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI); Dublin Core was used by 30 percent (multiple answers were permitted). Almost two thirds also used persistent identifiers to facilitate citation of these datasets. Three in four respondents also stated to support researchers in creating metadata for their data. Application programming interfaces (APIs) for uploading or searching datasets currently have not been implemented by any of the respondents yet. Little widespread is the use of semantic technologies like RDF.

Preservação digital à longo prazo e comunicação científica

The article deals with the requirements and needs for long-term digital preservation in different areas of scholarly work. The concept of long-term digital preservation is introduced by comparing it to digitization and archiving concepts and defined with the emphasis on dynamic activity within a certain time line. The structure of digital preservation is presented with regard to the elements of the activity as understood in Activity Theory. The life-cycle of digitization processes forms the basis of the main processing of preserved data in preservation archival system. The autor draws on the differences between humanities and social sciences on one hand and natural and technological science on the others. The empirical data characterizing the needs for digital preservation within different areas of scholarship are presented and show the difference in approaches to long-term digital preservation, as well as differences in selection the items and implementing the projects of digital preservation. Institutions and organizations can also develop different understanding of preservation requirements for digital documents and other objects. The final part of the paper is devoted to some general problems pertaining to the long-term digital preservation with the emphasis of the responsibility for the whole process of safe-guarding the cultural and scholarly heritage for the re-use of the posterior generations. It is suggested that the longevity of the libraries in comparison with much shorter life-span of private companies strengthens the claim of memory institutions to playing the central role in the long-term digital preservation.

State-of-the-art of long-term preservation in product lifecycle management

Providing access to digital information for the indefinite future is the intention of long-term digital preservation systems. One application domain that certainly needs to implement such long-term digital preservation processes is the design and engineering industry. In this industry, products are designed, manufactured, and operated with the help of sophisticated software tools provided by product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. During all PLM phases, including geographically distributed cross-domain and cross-company collaboration, a huge amount of heterogeneous digital product data and metadata is created. Legal and economic requirements demand that this product data has to be archived and preserved for a long-time period. Unfortunately, the software that is able to interpret the data will become obsolete earlier than the data since the software and hardware lifecycle is relatively short-lived compared to a product lifecycle. Companies in the engineering industry begin to realize that their data is in danger of becoming unusable while the products are in operation for several decades. To address this issue, different academic and industrial initiatives have been initiated that try to solve this problem. This article provides an overview of these projects including their motivations, identified problems, and proposed solutions. The studied projects are also verified against a classification of important aspects regarding scope and functionality of digital preservation in the engineering industry. Finally, future research topics are identified.

Digital repository: preservation environment and policy implementation

Distributed digital repositories can be used to address critical issues of long-term digital preservation and disaster management for large data centers. A policy-driven system provides an ideal solution for managing distributed repositories that require high flexibility and high configurability. Recent studies demonstrate that the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, a peer-to-peer server middleware, provides the requisite dynamic extensibility needed to manage time-varying policies, automate validation of assessment criteria, manage ingestion processes, manage access policies, and manage preservation policies. The policy management can be implemented underneath existing digital library infrastructure such as Fedora.

Long-Term Digital Preservation: A Digital Humanities Topic?

We argue that the so-called Digital Humanities fail to meet conventional criteria to be an accredited field of study on a par with Literature, Chemistry, Computer Science, and Civil Engineering, or even a specialized professorial emphasis such as Ancient History or Nuclear Physics. The argument uses long-term digital preservation as an example to argue that Digital Humanities proponents’ case for their research agenda does not merit financial support, emphasizing practical aspects over subjective theory.

BwFLA – A Functional Approach to Digital Preservation

Emulation evolves into a mature digital preservation strategy, providing authentic functional access to a wide range of digital objects, using their original creation environments. In contrast to format migration strategies a functional, emulation-based approach requires a number of additional components, i.e. the full softwarestack required to render a digital object but also its configuration. The goal of the bwFLA project is the implementation and development of a distributed framework for emulation-based services and technologies to address Baden-Württemberg state and higher education institutes’ libraries’ and archives’ new challenges in digital long-term preservation.

Costs and Benefits of a Shared Digital Long-Term Preservation System

This paper describes the cost-benefit analysis of digital long-term preservation (LTP) that was carried out in the context of the Finnish National Digital Library Project (NDL) in 2010. The analysis was based on the assumption that as many as 200 archives, libraries, and museums will share an LTP system. The term ‘system’ shall be understood as encompassing not only information technology, but also human resources, organizational structures, policies and funding mechanisms. The cost analysis shows that an LTP system will incur, over the first 12 years, cumulative costs of €42 million, i.e. an average of €3.5 million per annum. Human resources and investments in information technology are the major cost factors. After the initial stages, the analysis predicts annual costs of circa €4 million. The analysis compared scenarios with and without a shared LTP system. The results indicate that a shared system will have remarkable benefits. At the development and implementation stages, a shared system shows an advantage of €30 million against the alternative scenario consisting of five independent LTP solutions. During the later stages, the advantage is estimated at €10 million per annum. The cumulative cost benefit over the first 12 years would amount to circa €100 million.

Decision criteria in digital preservation: What to measure and how

The enormous amount of valuable information that is produced today and needs to be made available over the long-term has led to increased efforts in scalable, automated solutions for long-term digital preservation. The mission of preservation planning is to define the optimal actions to ensure future access to digital content and react to changes that require adjustments in repository operations. Considerable effort has been spent in the past on defining, implementing, and validating a framework and system for preservation planning. This article sheds light on the actual decision criteria and influence factors to be considered when choosing digital preservation actions. It is based on an extensive evaluation of case studies on preservation planning for a range of different types of objects with partners from different institutional backgrounds. We categorize decision criteria from a number of real-world decision-making instances in a taxonomy. We show that a majority of the criteria can be evaluated by applying automated measurements under realistic conditions, and demonstrate that controlled experimentation and automated measurements can be used to substantially improve repeatability of decisions and reduce the effort needed to evaluate preservation components. The presented measurement framework enables scalable preservation and monitoring and supports trust in preservation decisions because extensive evidence is produced in a reproducible, automated way and documented as the basis of decision making in a standardized form.

Towards Support for Long-Term Digital Preservation in Product Life Cycle Management

Important legal and economic motivations exist for the design and engineering industry to address and integrate digital long-term preservation into product life cycle management (PLM). Investigations revealed that it is not sufficient to archive only the product design data which is created in early PLM phases, but preservation is needed for data that is produced during the entire product lifecycle including early and late phases. Data that is relevant for preservation consists of requirements analysis documents, design rationale, data that reflects experiences during product operation and also metadata like social collaboration context. In addition, also the engineering environment itself that contains specific versions of all tools and services is a candidate for preservation. This paper takes a closer look at engineering preservation use case scenarios as well as PLM characteristics and workflows that are relevant for long-term preservation. Resulting requirements for a long-term preservation system lead to an OAIS (Open Archival Information System) based system architecture and a proposed preservation service interface that respects the needs of the engineering industry.

The Life3 Predictive Costing Tool for Digital Collections

Predicting the costs of long-term digital preservation is a crucial yet complex task for even the largest repositories and institutions. For smaller projects and individual researchers faced with preservation requirements, the problem is even more overwhelming, as they lack the accumulated experience of the former. Yet, being able to estimate future preservation costs is vital to answering a range of important questions for each. The LIFE (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) project, which has just completed its third phase, helps institutions and researchers address these concerns, reducing the financial and preservation risks, and allowing decision makers to assess a range of options in order to achieve effective preservation while operating within financial restraints. The project is a collaboration among University College London (UCL), The British Library, and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Funding has been supplied in the United Kingdom by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Research Information Network (RIN).

디지털 콘텐츠의 무결성 유지를 위한 장기적인 보존 정책에 관한 연구

디지털 콘텐츠의 장기적인 보존 정책에서 디지털 콘텐츠의 무결성 유지를 보장하는 것은 가장 중요한 부분 중 하나이다. 그래서 본 연구는 장기적인 관점에서 디지털 콘텐츠의 무결성 유지를 보장할 수 있는 명문화된 보존 정책의 기틀을 마련하기 위해, 실행 수준의 장기적인 보존 정책에 포함되어야 하는 항목들과 세부적인 요건들을 도출해보았다. 특히 해외의 디지털 아카이빙 사례들 중에서 무결성 유지에 초점을 맞춘 장기적인 보존 정책들을 조사하였고 저장 매체와 파일 포맷, 매체와 포맷 변환, 재난 방지와 복구 정책, 관리와 취급, 검사와 모니터링, 그리고 보안의 관점에서 분석하였다 Assuring that the integrity of digital contents is reliably maintained is an important component of long-term digital preservation. The purpose of this study was to examine and analysis the best practices of digital preservation policy and provide the basis theory for establishing a preservation policy for maintaining the integrity of digital contents. In order to achieve the purpose of the study, we examined the digital archiving practices for maintaining the integrity of digital contents. Especially, we focused on the storage media and file formats, the media and format conversion, disaster prevention and recovery, management and handling, inspection and monitoring, and security policies.

The Use of Quality Management Standards in Trustworthy Digital Archives

Quality management is an essential part in creating a trustworthy digital archive. The German network of expertise in Digital long-term preservation (nestor), in cooperation with the German Institute for Standards (DIN), has undertaken a small study to analyse systematically the relevance and usage of quality management standards for long-term preservation and to filter out the specific standardisation need for digital archives. This paper summarises the results of the study. It gives an overview on the differences in understanding the task “quality management” within different organisations and how they carry out appropriate measures, such as documentation, transparency, adequacy, and measureability in order to demonstrate the trustworthiness of their digital archive.

Long-term Digital Preservation in E-government — a Case of Slovenia

Long-term Digital Preservation in E-government — a Case of Slovenia The use of information and communication technology and its widespread presence cause a vast amount of data to be created in the public and private sectors every day. The widespread presence of e-government sites, services and communication in the developed world add even more data. This digital data does not only represent the accountability and reliability of the processes, steps and decisions taken by organisations, but also a source of information for future generations. This paper discusses the issue of long-term digital preservation with a special focus on long-term digital preservation in public administration. It analyses problematic issues, current development trends in this area, and principles and solutions that can be found around the world. The paper focuses on Slovenia as one of the EU countries that has most effectively developed its e-government during the last decade. It analyses the situation in Slovenia through legal, organisational and other changes that have appeared over the last few years, and considers this as a model for possible long-term digital preservation. To describe the situation for digital preservation in Slovenian public administration, the results of empirical research made in 2007 are used. The paper uses theoretical background from the field of digital preservation and empirical results to show the important link between e-business, e-government, e-governance and digital preservation. It demonstrates that since Slovenian public administration has strictly specified business processes, the task of implementing digital preservation is much easier. The same concepts can be transferred to the private sector in Slovenia or anywhere else in the world.

A survey of digital preservation strategies

Digital information is created easily by a wide range of electronic devices. But, it is surprisingly difficult to preserve digital information over a long period, because both technology as well as relevant organizational context change over time. Without careful protection, there is a real risk that these data can neither be retrieved from old storage media, nor that its content be rendered from old file formats or understood. In the future, our society may indeed be confronted with a digital ‘black hole’. From the 1990s, scientists and curators started to design long-term digital preservation systems and strategies that shall enable the survival of digital information. This survey article gives an overview of the current main preservation strategies. We further discuss and compare those strategies. Finally, we design two procedures for making information accessible and manipulable over time. At the end of the article, some emerging challenges for preservation strategies are addressed briefly.

Preliminary Digital Preservation Interoperability Framework (DPIF) Results

In October 2009, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/ International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) reconstituted the Study Group (SG) on Digital Content Management and Protection (SGDCMP) with more focused terms of reference. Specifically, the attention of the SG was targeted on the important issue of long term “digital preservation”. This term is understood to include the protection and management of both digital data and digital content, including associated metadata. One of the SGDCMP 2010 tasks was to organize workshops and symposiums that would help to develop a roadmap on long-term digital preservation standardization by identifying requirements, technologies, and best practices. Through the US International Committee for Information Technology Standards/Digital Content Management and Protection (INCITS/DCMP) and ISO/IEC SGDCMP, Wo Chang from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was appointed as the program chair for both workshop and symposium events.This was a two-part series on roadmap development for Digital Preservation. The US Workshop (co-hosted with NIST and INCITS, March 29-31 at NIST, US) was the first event focusing on US national needs and best practices, while the international symposium (co-hosted with NIST and ISO/IEC SGDCMP, April 21 – 23 in Dresden, Germany) gathered different requirements and best practices at the international level. Both roadmaps would then be combined as input to the ISO/IEC SGDCMP to standardize digital preservation interoperability framework for effective and reliable access to preserved digital contents between interoperable digital preservation repositories.This paper presents some of the preliminary results from the above two events. It is comprised of seven vision speeches from keynote speakers, followed by 50 presentations categorized into three tracks:• Content organizations (government, public/private institutes, etc.) for handling the preservation operations, strategies, and requirements• Technology developers (academia, commercial companies, R&D labs, etc.) for providing preservation approaches and solutions• Standards bodies (ISO/IEC, consortiums, industry associations, government initiatives, etc.) for establishing preservation best practices and standards

Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records: Trustworthy Digital Objects

The proper entities for archival attention are patterns inherent in transmitted and stored messages. Most digital archival repository technology—what private sector enterprises call content management (CM) technology—has been thoroughly understood and widely deployed for more than a decade. This technology is not adequate for long-term digital preservation because it includes no mechanisms for reliably assuring authenticity and intelligibility of digital documents for fifty years or longer. CM provides for near-term preservation without handling long-term preservation, which must overcome risks associated with technological obsolescence and fading human memory. This article offers a solution to mitigate these risks. Implementing the needed software would be a small addition to widely deployed CM offerings. This long-term preservation solution, devised for cultural and scholarly digital documents, is already structured to support archival principles for business records, and the article describes this Trus...